I've hunkered down and decided to go ahead and use Text_Wiki for handling wikitext for entering entries. The problem is that I've found Text_Wiki to be slower than acceptable to me for general use, lack of user-applied styles to tags and the fact that you had to pass an array of all the extant pages to determine if the page exists or not in the output text.

I'll resolve the speed issue by caching the HTML output of the wikitext in the database, and using a table of references between pages to know when a new page is added, deleted or changed in case I need to re-render the page on changes to the other page. In one of the late betas a callback function had been added by the author to handle page existence issues for wikilinks, and the style thing... well, maybe in time that'll be resolved. I did some initial hacking on that problem before when I contacted him directly about it, and it was (mostly) encouraging to me, so maybe I can play with it more. In reality, though, I won't use that feature much at all (and when I would, I could just embed some HTML directly.

So user input is handled. I showed Marilynn a very rough mock-up of WYSIWYG input using TinyMCE as an input editor for a textarea field, but while she liked it I felt it was lacking in usefulness, because there was no intermediary text that could be easily parsed and processed for different subproducts I wanted to work on.

Writing the guts of a basic system shouldn't be that difficult at all, especially given that wikitext is handled for me using Text_Wiki for the most part.

Funny anecdote regarding getting together an element for layout: I think that Marilynn might be into the idea of this project, too, because yesterday after the General Sam Houston Folklife Festival we were doing a little aimless driving to see what we could find out highway 75 N from Huntsville. (Answer: nothing.) We were driving along and she said that a photo of a country road lined with trees and no signage or signs of civilization would make a cool graphic for the site header. I agreed, and so we started to look at the roads from that light.

Finally, I found what I thought was perfect: shady, tree-lined, lush and green. I pulled over. Marilynn freaked out.

"We can't see what's in the grass on the side. I don't like the way we're leaning to the side," she said, with a very nervous look on her face. I thought about it, and figured to go with her instinct and the general voice of reason and better judgement regarding pulling over on a nonexistent shoulder that has no visibility down through the foliage and pulled back onto the road and drove away.

"I didn't mean don't get the picture," she continued. "I just didn't feel good about pulling over there. Stop on the road with the flashers on and take the picture." I didn't want to do that, though, because the speed limit on this little farm-to-market road was 65 MPH. I didn't feel like getting run over!

So our quest for a good photo continues. But it's a sign that this is the right project for us.

restlessmind