In November 11, 2005, I finally launched the redesign of warrenforestcourt.org. The most notable changes (other than appearance) is the navigation and the Local Rules of Court. I had scratched my head for a while trying to figure how best to sort the convoluted numbering system used by the rules. The solutions that seemed to offer promise in MySql were just a little to dependent on some rather ridiculous requirements that I didn't want to write code for. Sure, I knew it was possible, but there had to be a better way.
And there is. I realized that a wiki is the perfect solution. To create a menu, or list of pages, one simply adds links in a wiki page. Need to add a new page between two existing pages? Just add it in the appropriate place in the list. No sorting needed! That, and wikis inherently make is easy to allow the staff to change/update content without bugging me to directly edit the html. There's nothing more annoying (ok, so I exaggerate) than having to manually edit the html every time a law clerk changes. Sure, it's a quick update of a name and email address, but why do I have to do it when any of the office staff can type in a name just as easily as I can. Oh right, the html markup intimidates them, and then there's the whole issue of educating them about FTPing the source file etc.
So began my quest for a suitable wiki platform. I found a few I thought I could hack up to work, but I was spending way to much time playing with and altering the core code. That's just bad practice. Then I found PmWiki. All I have to say is, its been great since. Although I have a few beefs with the project, overall, I am satisfied with the end result. You see, PmWiki was built from the ground up to be customizable. Even core functions are easy to override without touching any of the core code. In fact, as indicated on my profile page, I have even written an extension among other things for it. Perhaps, if I find the time, I'll do a writeup in that extension and how it evolved into what it is today.
