[wikka-community] International support and differences between wakka forks

[Nils Lindenberg]

Hi,

On Jan 12, 2008 9:58 PM, Krzysztof Trybowski <trybowski at aeropolis.pl> wrote:
> The problem is, that both projects lack decent international support.
> I'd like to be able to apply a localization pack and not worry about
> any problems with translation AND national characters (diacritics).

That's what we all like. Unfortunately the support for utf8, making
such things possible, wasn't exactly good in earlier versions of php.
That's why different forks of wakka choose different ways to overcome
this problem.

> Also I fail to see what are the differences between wacko and wikka.
> WikiMatrix seems to be very unprecise in this aspect, since when it
> states that something is "optional" or via "plugin" it may as well
> just simply mean that "somebody somewhere" posted a dirty hack that
> would do the job.
>
> Could any of you put some light at these aspects? Is there an
> international support planned for Wikka? What are major differences
> compared to Wacko?

I haven't looked into the Wacko project for while.But when I did,
there were differences in the page hierarchie: flat (wikka),
parent/son (wacko) and mindmap support: native (wikka), ? (wacko);
page-watch lists: yes (wacko), no (wikka). That's all I can think of
without looking at their documentation.

Besides that, my answer may be a bit biased since I am member of wikka
;) So if you really want to see the differences, you'll need to
install both and play around with them.

> Actually I with some wakka-related project would re-unite and work
> towards universal, scalable, powerful yet lightweight system. Or maybe
> I'm missing something?

Even if it is not visible to a normal user, the code beyond the
surface of wakka has been changed quite a lot by all of the bigger
forks (and sometimes in different directions). For example :) , there
were (and still are) many steps to be taken on the road to
international support, but wikka and wacko are on a different road
with this issue.

And don't forget that different forks had/have/ will have different
aims and target audiences, uniwakka for example is aiming for the
academic market and therefore offers features we probably wont include
into a wikka release.

So one of the keys is extensibility: even now it should not be much
effort to use an action (or a handler) coded for wacko in wikka (and
vice versa).  Extending the formatter is still more difficult - but
hopefully we can change this sometime the future.

Hopefully I could make clear that while wikka and wacko are looking on
the similar surface, matters are more complicated, leaving room for
the exchange of ideas and code (like it has been done in the past and
surely will be done in the future) while re-uniting wacko and wikka
has a small probability.

Greetings,
Nils Lindenberg