Wiki

Wiki markup support for XPages wiki on Domino 852

Patrick KwintenLeave a comment

I experienced a problem with the support of wiki markup in the XPages Wiki available on OpenNTF. In the discussion area Sean Cull comes with a temporary solution: go back from the CKEditor to the Dojo editor.

Okej, you will miss some functionality from the CKeditor but if your content is in wiki markup and your editors are instructed to write in wiki markup and basically you want your wiki content to be in wiki markup there is not so much other you can do 😕

Can an application that does not support wiki markup be considered as a wiki application?

Here is what you have to do.

  • Open custom control prtContent
  • Select the rich text field, content1
  • In the Dojo properties tab specify as Dojo type: ibm.xsp.widget.layout.RichText

More information on rich text in Designer 8.5.1 +2 you can read in the Information Center.

At Lotusphere a lot was being talked as positioning Domino as an application platform instead of a mail platform. @IBM: please fix your sink (applications) first since maintaining such a platform with such applications is getting pretty messy 😦

 

DominoWiki – Anyone continued improving the application?

Patrick Kwinten3 Comments

I am planning some activities for later this year. One of them is the continues improvement updating and writing down standards and guidelines within Notes/Domino development.

Since I want the database lightly accessible (read: open in browser) I am thinking about moving the information from our non-webified Notes database into a Wiki.

I have 2 candidates: #1 is the favoured DominoWiki and the other is the XPages Wiki which never have come to an official release (shame on you IBM!).

Both applications haven’t had a new release in 2010 and I am not sure if there are plans for updates? (nice idea for OpenNTF). The XPages wiki has got a smoother presentation layer but DominoWiki, like others, I find much more robust.

Since I am am a bit of favour for DominoWiki I wonder if anyone kept developing on the application and if improved code is available?

Anyone using the blog template? What did you modified?

Patrick Kwinten4 Comments

We received  an interesting but rather large request from an internal customer for the IBM blog template. Basically the organization wants to have the template available to order for everyone in their organization.

So I have now two tracks to fill in:

  • Which modifications do I have to make in order to optimize the blog template itself?
  • Which preparations do I have to make so people can order a blog and how can we support it?

I have pretty adapted the look & feel of the blog via CSS and added some images so it comes close (read: it looks better to my opinion) to our Intranet.

I did not go away from a table layout, as used in the default setup. I experienced with using 3 column layout via CSS (aka Holy grail) but I experienced some problems and this was basically because of additional HTML pollution Domino spits out.

Next steps was to spit through the Lotus Notes Domino Blog Template DX Tag Dictionary to see what was available more under the hood. This resulted in some modifications in the Block Templates (available under Advanced \HTML Templates) for the LeftSideBar and RightSideBar documents. I added:

  • Hot Topics
  • Blog roll
  • Recent edits

Under the item templates I added the author image in the document Default Item. This image is taken from a user profile document, when registered.

For now the blog looks and works great, but I guess there is always room for improvement therefor the following question:

  • I am just wondering what other available options I might have overlooked and which you think are added value ?

I know there are a lot more options (documented / undocumented) available in the template.

So far for track 1.

For track 2 I was thinking about setting up a Wiki (or another blog?) to give users support how to use the blog. In the blog itself I want to include a link so people become aware that there is a common place to look for information / instructions. I know that there is help available in the normal Help database but users tend not to start looking here.

I also would like to setup an Feed aggregator that collects all the RSS streams from all the blogs. This aggregator could work as the homepage when people enter blog.company.com.

  • Which Domino based solution would you suggest for such an aggregator?

I know on OpenNTF there are some initiatives for Feed aggregators, but I have not tested them myself, maybe you have done already? It would be nice to have something running before Project Vulcan comes available =)

I also have to figure out the easiest way to setup a mechanism for url mapping so each blog installation is mapped to a user name ex. blog.company.com/patrickkwinten and users can check availability of a suffix.

Hmmm… more work to do then I expected…

XPages Wiki – Great stuff but what about tables?

Patrick Kwinten4 Comments

I am moving a Handbook which is now 100% in Notes into the XPages Wiki. The application works great (good job guys) but it bothers me 1 major thing:

  • The creation of tables

I have found some help for Wiki markup here:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/Wiki_Help

But creating tables feels a bit buggy.

I have no idea what the XPages Wiki supports or not compared with the markup for Wikipedia?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup#link-external

But coming back to the topic: How do you define tables in the Wiki? Right now I am using a work-around and I display the content I would normally display in a table via an unordered list:

column 1 column2
column 1 column2
  • column 1
    • column 2
  • column 1
    • column 2