I'd like to be able to make wikis where the author of a node can choose what wiki (or other) syntax to write in - using, for example, a drop-down box on the edit screen.
This will allow you to do things like have documentation pages written in POD, test suite pages written in plain text and rendered using a simple formatter class that just puts <pre> around everything, and discussion pages written in your favourite Wiki syntax.
There's an example of this at http://openguides-dev.aardvark-ss.com/?Stylesheet_Manchester
Now, that's done in the OpenGuides layer - I haven't seen Jody's code so I don't know quite how; I'm guessing that he's always calling $relevant_formatter->format rather than $wiki->formatter.
I want to add this multiple formatter feature to CGI::Wiki::Kwiki and so am wondering whether it should be explicitly supported by CGI::Wiki, and if so, should this be done by changing the CGI::Wiki API or by creating CGI::Wiki::Formatter::Multiple to handle it all.
The main tasks that a solution needs to accomplish are:
- when saving a node, store some metadata to indicate the required formatter - when displaying a node, retrieve that metadata and use it to choose the appropriate formatter
Changing the CGI::Wiki API would mean that CGI::Wiki was mandating the behaviour of a particular metadata field, something it hasn't done up to now and I'm not sure it should do.
Handling it via CGI::Wiki::Formatter::Multiple would mean that the application code would be responsible for storing and retrieving the formatter-type metadata. The wins in this case over just handling all the multipleness in code would be:
- can just call $wiki->format instead of selecting the right formatter class, instantiating and calling that - things like allowed_tags only need to be supplied once, to CGI::Wiki::Formatter::Multiple->new, rather than to each individual formatter. (On the other hand, you might *want* to allow different tags for the different types of pages.)
Thoughts?
Kake