[Moin-devel] UI changes

[Michael Geary]

> From: Frederik De Bleser
>
> ... I started working on make some new icons for moinmoin ...

I got rid of the icons completely. To me, they seem to be to be one of the
most confusing things about a MoinMoin wiki. Some user actions are text
links, some are icons. Some are at the top of the page, some are at the
bottom.

Instead, I've got one bar at the top of the page with text links for the
most common user actions. The bottom of the page has text links for less
frequently used actions. (Search is still at the bottom, but I plan to try
out the "Google-like" search I saw on the patches page. If it works well,
I'll probably put it the top of the page.)

I've made a bunch of other changes as well. Some of the more interesting
ones:

* Added the ability to specify display text for a freeform wiki link, like
this:

   ["The Page Name" The Display Text]

This would have been a deal-killer for me: I couldn't use MoinMoin for my
site if I couldn't alias freeform links.

This syntax does seem a bit counterintuitive--I'd sort of expect the display
text to be in quotes, not the page name--but I did it this way to be
consistent with the way other things work in MoinMoin, such as:

   [http://www.foobar.com/ The Display Text].

* Changed the page name escaping to make prettier URLs. Spaces turn into
underscores and hyphens remain unchanged (because I use them a lot). Special
characters use =XX instead of _XX. For example, my personal page titled
"Michael Geary - Software Inventor" would have this partial URL in a
standard MoinMoin wiki:

Michael_20Geary_20_2d_20Software_20Inventor

Yuck! On my site, it's simply:

Michael_Geary_-_Software_Inventor

* The "Random" link jumps directly to a random page. The purpose of a Random
link is entertainment, and it's much more entertaining to go directly to a
page instead of just displaying a list of random pages.

* Changed the Edit page quite a bit. It always shows the preview, and the
preview is to the right of the editing area so you don't have to scroll up
and down. (This works better for most but not all pages, so I'm going to add
an option to use the old edit style with the preview below the edit area.)

Naturally, I'll make all of these changes available to anyone who wants them
once I dehackify the code a bit. :-)

In the meantime, stop by and try it out:

http://www.geary.com/

None of this is "done", of course--I've got lots of other changes in mind. A
couple of them:

* I plan to put all of the navigation links in a sidebar instead of at the
top and bottom of the page.

* I want to turn off WordsSmashedTogetherLikeSo links entirely--they really
make things confusing when someone named McGeary tries to add a page. :-)
But I'd have to edit all the help files to do this. Maybe I'll hack it so
that anything beginning with Help still works as a WikiName but nothing else
does.

-Mike