Wiki/CMS Software
I’ve previously mentioned my interest in what I guess amounts to a comprehensive CMS and bibliographic database solution: what I called a BibBliki.
It seems I’m not the only one frustrated with existing CMS solutions. Leo Simmons discusses an interesting idea of using Ruby for an SVN-based CMS system. Meanwhile, a web designer complains—rightly in my view—that existing wiki software sucks from the standpoint of a web designer who believes in standard’s-based semantic markup, CSS, etc. As they put it Even the ones that avoid nested tables and font tags (which are only a couple) spit out bad markup. Lots of classes, not enough semantics, and horribly written stylesheets.
Here’s what I really want:
- clean XHTML and CSS (clean enough to easily process with XSLT if need be)
- flexible wiki markup support (I’d like to add support for citation coding)
- robust storage (I don’t want to worry about lost data)
- easy export of content in various formats, including XML (say DocBook)
- ability to integrate with a bibliographic database
I’ve not found a single piece of software that satisfies even my first four desires (the last is obviously rather non-standard). The Ruby-based Instiki offers many of them (in particular excellent export support), but I’ve lost some data to it. Also, the textile support built into Instiki (using the RedCloth parser) is somewhat thin on its support for semantic HTML output (proper class attributes everywhere, for example).
Still, I get the feeling Ruby may be a good language to develop what I’m after; with its built-in RSS and XML support, and new web frameworks like Rails. Another possibility is the Drupal-based LibDB. Alas, I can’t work out how to get the Drupal textile support properly working.
