Rails - Feb 2005 - Instiki @ O''Reilly ETech 2005

Hi all,

Sorry if I should be posting this elsewhere--I couldn''t find an
Instiki specific mailing list, but the Instiki site is down.

I wanted to mention that my friend Tim Lauer and I are going to be
doing a short "high order bit" talk at the O''Reilly Emerging
Technologies conference, describing a particular use of Instiki which
we came up with:
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/view/e_sess/5985

Tim is an elementary school prinicpal (at http://lewiselementary.org),
and some of his teachers are using Instiki to publish student writing.
 The teachers have Instiki installed on their iBooks, and the built in
Apache server is tweaked to redirect to Instiki, to take advantage of
the built in Rendezvous support, so the students can easily find the
teacher''s Instiki web over the wireless network using Safari''s
Rendezvous bookmark feature.  Since the teachers only turn on their
wiki when they need it, they avoid most of the security problems of
wikis without having to deal with getting through firewalls or helping
11 year olds remember passwords.  Once they''re done the web can be
published and put on the school web site.

Anyhow, it is a neat little hack and has worked out well for them.

I''m working on some extensions of the idea, and, not being a Ruby
hacker, could use some guidance.  Specifically, I want the teachers to
be able to create webs that are pre-populated with a list of authors
(the students in the class).  Fetching the list from SchoolTool, the
Zope3-based school admin system I''m working on
(http://www.schooltool.org/Members/hoffman/news/rubyex) but I can''t
quite figure out how to seed the web with the list of authors.  That
is, assuming that it is at all valid to create a list of authors who
haven''t yet contributed to any pages.

Any advice would be appreciated.  

Tom Hoffman
http://tuttlesvc.org

Tom Hoffman wrote:
>can''t quite figure out how to seed the web with the list of
authors.  That
>is, assuming that it is at all valid to create a list of authors who
>haven''t yet contributed to any pages.
>  
>
Tom,

Author pages are literally _nothing_ but normal wiki pages. You can have 
pages authored by "HomePage".

If I were you, I would probably create wiki pages by doing an HTTP POST 
to /:wiki_name/save/:page_name, the same way as Instiki itself does. The 
POST data should have two input fields (for the page itself and for the 
author''s name). Check out the HTML form in the "Edit Page"
screen.

P.S. Not that I would want to be categorized as an Instiki hacker :)

-- 
Best regards,

Alexey Verkhovsky

Ruby Forum: http://ruby-forum.org        (moderator)
RForum:     http://rforum.andreas-s.net  (co-author)
Instiki:    http://instiki.org           (maintainer)