My use for a wiki revolves around documentation for our products. This consists of pages created both by the staff and tutorials added by the end users. Our system has about 500 pages of documentation.
Table of Contents
A table of contents should be generated automatically from headers tags, the way MediaWiki does. This is extremely useful when you have long pages of content that are several screens tall.
The table of content links would be defined like this:
{h1}Overview{/h1}
Blah blah blah this is talking about this subject.
{h2}Detail 1{/h2}
Blah blah blah
{h2}Detail 2{/h2}
Blah blah blah
The code above would generate a table of contents like this:
Overview
-Detail 1
-Detail 2
Just see any wikipedia page to see what I am talking about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing
Autolinks
I suggest adding a tag like this:
{wiki}Turtles{/wiki}
This would then link to the page titled "Turtles" in the wiki. Is this necessary? Yes! We are presently creating links in IP.Content that look like this:
{url=
http://www.mysite.com/forum?app=css&record=53}Turtles{/url}
This is extremely hard when we are writing a mass of interconnected pages. Some of the pages might not exist yet, and if they don't we can't add links until we create the page and find out what the ID number is.
The autolink tag also should included in the forum tags. You will then have conversations like this:
User: Hi guys, I am having trouble with this feature? What's wrong?
Staff: Please see the {wiki}feature{/wiki} page for the solution. You can read more about this on the {wiki}SomethingElse{/wiki} page.
Page Content
The page content itself can simply be like a forum post with BBCode. I would rather have something reliable and simple, so I am not going to ask for tables and too many formatting features. The only difference is the post content can be edited by anyone with appropriate permissions. A backup system has to be present for each page in case someone messes something up. If this were not possible at first, I would be okay with that, and would just set permissions to staff only.
Page Organization
This feature is relatively simple to implement, and would blow every existing wiki system out of the water. MediaWiki and IP.Content have both failed at this, and the solution is very simple. Pages should be arranged in a hierarchy. Let's say "Cats" is a child of the "Animals" page. The breadcrumb links at the top of "Cats" would look like this:
Home>Wiki>Animals>Cats
This simple idea apparently is beyond the ability of MediaWiki to implement. IP.Content has something like this, but it uses "categories" each with a uniform template, instead of an actual page. Presently I am manually creating breadcrumb links in IP.Content that look like this:
{url=
http://www.mysite.com/forum}Home{/url} >
{url=
http://www.mysite.com/forum?app=css&record=53}Wiki{/url} >
{url=
http://www.mysite.com/forum?app=css&record=47}Animals{/url} >
{url=
http://www.mysite.com/forum?app=css&record=23}Cats{/url}
This has to be added to every single page. We've given up on user-generated content in this system, although they are willing and have provided tons of content under MediaWiki.
Conclusion
That's really all you need to crush every wiki system out there! It doesn't seem very complicated to me. Why do not forum developers understand the need for this? Customers would flock to XF if you featured this, because no one else provides it, and it's so basic and crucial. PLEASE add this in the way I have described.
