I got a reaction from
Pascal van Cauwenberghe, author of
wiki2go on my entry on website2go. He wondered if and what features of website2go would be useful for
wiki2go. Let me tell you, that the naming of website2go is not accidental :-). From
wiki2go, I liked the 2go aspect the most. 2go meaning you can take the wiki anywhere on your laptop, and merge updates once you get back online.
Subversion support is planned for wiki2go, and I hope to feed what I learn from making website2go in to wiki2go. Pascal told me the next version of wiki2go will have support for multiple layouts in one site, as well as plugins and ruby code within pages, so both layout and content generation are very flexible. A few differences to what I need for my site and sites like it remain, I guess we'll have to see how we could fit it in wiki2go:
- the site works as static html only (so no need to run a cgi or webrick server)
- the site has a hierarchical nature
- easy to mix html pages with other content (e.g. images and pdf files), and keep the html together with the other files.
- recently published (instead of recent changes - if I spellcheck a page or fix a link, I do not necessarily want the rss feed updated)
So far, I see website2go as a small experiment to make it easier to maintain my website, as well as to experiment with subversion as the basis for a wiki or a nimble content management system. Managing versions is difficult enough to warrant some
set based development - we need multiple perspectives to understand issues of versioning, publishing and showing changes.
In a previous life, while developing the i-tor content management system, we got a serious headache from trying to build-in our own flavour of version management. Eventually, versioning didn't make it. After a disaster, where a colleague accidentally deleted a lot of my writing, and we were unable to recover it, I'm absolutely convinced versioning is a must, even if it is to only provide a linear undo. I'm not in the habit of losing data, and I'm not going to adopt it :-)