Implementing site todo lists and logs
I'm struggling with figuring out how to set up the wiki to support site logs and todo lists, two of the primary features this thing is intended to help with. Part of the problem is that it's not easy to google for this kind of "meta" information; instead, the results seem to be actual todo lists rather than howto's on the subject.
What is it that we want to do?
- user-editable comments
This is implicit in the use of a wiki
Contents
TODO list should reflect what needs to happen on the next site visit
This could be a list of tasks, sensors needing replacement or attention, measurements that need to be made, etc. Once done, it is hoped/intended that the list be updated, so that it ALWAYS reflects the current situation. Of course, this is probably not going to happen in many cases, but it's still the goal.
Regardless of the content of a todo list, I'd like to have the user name & timestamp of the last edit to be stored & displayed prominently.
site logs should be time-stamped comments on what went on or was found at the site
The intention is to have an entry representing each visit to a site, with the newest at top, older below. For a start, this probably can just be done by editing the entire site-log -- but at some risk of a user accidentally screwing up the whole thing... Not sure how to protect against that, other than maintain backups and be able to redeploy them.
Maybe a wiki isn't the best way to store these comments, but it seems to be a practical way to make it possible for any user to enter the information. One possibility would be to "scrape" the site logs and store them separately?
possibly useful mediawiki features
The mediawiki engine supports a few features that might perhaps be useful to do these things -- if we can figure out how they work.
namespaces
Namespaces sound like they could be useful, but it seems like there is a fixed set of these and it's not easy to add more, or at least it's non-trivial.
categories
I think categories might be easier to define on the fly, but not sure how/if they might be used...
templates
A template would seem to be useful as a known starting point for a todo list or site log -- again, if we can grok how to do so.
