ikiwiki/doc/users/jon.mdwn

[[!meta title="Jon Dowland"]][[!toc levels=2]]

## intro

I'm looking at ikiwiki both for my personal site but also as a
team-documentation management system for a small-sized group of UNIX
sysadmins.

* my edits should appear either as 'Jon' (if I've used
  [[tips/untrusted_git_push]]); 'jmtd.net', 'jmtd.livejournal.com', 
  'jmtd' if I've forgotten to set my local git config properly,
  or once upon a time 'alcopop.org/me/openid/' or 'jondowland'.
* My [homepage](https://yalanci.neocities.org/) is powered by ikiwiki

I gave a talk at the [UK UNIX User's Group](http://www.ukuug.org/) annual
[Linux conference](http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2008/) in 2008 about
organising system administrator documentation. Roughly a third of this talk
was discussing IkiWiki in some technical detail and suggesting it as a good
piece of software for this task.

 * slides at <http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/jon.dowland/unix/docs/>.

I am also working on some ikiwiki hacks:

* [[todo/allow site-wide meta definitions]]
* Improving the means by which you can migrate from mediawiki to
  IkiWiki. See [[tips/convert mediawiki to ikiwiki]] and the
  [[plugins/contrib/mediawiki]] plugin.

I am mostly interested in ikiwiki usability issues:

 * [[bugs/the login page is unclear when multiple methods exist]]
 * [[bugs/backlinks onhover thing can go weird]]
 * [[todo/CSS classes for links]]
 * [[todo/adjust commit message for rename, remove]]

The following I have been looking at, but are on the back-burner:

* an alternative approach to [[plugins/comments]] (see
  [[todo/more flexible inline postform]] for one piece of the puzzle;
  <http://dev.jmtd.net/comments/> for some investigation into making the post
  form more integrated); possibly also [[todo/pagespec to disable ikiwiki directives]]
* a system for [[forum/managing_todo_lists]] (see also
  [[todo/interactive todo lists]] and <http://dev.jmtd.net/outliner/> for the
  current WIP).
* a `tag2` plugin, which does the same thing as [[plugins/tag]], but
  does not sit on top of [[ikiwiki/wikilink]]s, so does not result in
  bugs such as [[bugs/tagged() matching wikilinks]]. Code for this lives
  in my github `tag2` branch: <http://github.com/jmtd/ikiwiki>

Penultimately, the following are merely half-formed thoughts:

 * adding and removing tags to pages via the edit form by ticking and
   unticking checkboxes next to a tag name (rather than entering the 
   directive into the text of the page directly)
 * perhaps the same for meta
 * I'd like to make profiling ikiwiki in action very easy for newcomers.
   Perhaps even a plugin that created a file /profile or similar on build.

## backlinks

Finally, backlinks (since I have issues with the current backlinks
implementation, see [[bugs/backlinks onhover thing can go weird]]):

[[!map pages="link(users/Jon)"]]