pcplantdb

["John Schinnerer" <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

Still catching up...

> At some point we are going to start making
> decisions. Should we have some sort of
> decision making process? How do we organise
> ourselves?

informal consensus might work for now.

> 2) Using some sort of maarkup language al la wiki
>       One posibility is that a page could be supplied
>       with pre built section heading, something like
>
> - Latin Name
>
> - Common Name
>
> - Edible Uses
>
> and the user could fill in the text between.

I am using something like this for a client's site where they are responsible
for quite a bit of (very structured) content, in the current case items in an
online gallery of results from art empowerment workshops - each workshop is
one object which they create TTW.
For the most structured items (title, date, media, location, etc.), they enter
a text string in a web form text field; the page generation handles all
style/formatting.
For more 'open form' text (simple wiki=page-like formatting of larger chunks
of text) I use a simple structured document product and they enter structured
text in a regular web form text field.  The product also handles vanilla HTML
so they can use a little of that if they know how.

> I'd be quite interested in seeing a slashdot for permaculture
> (or actually the whole green thing!) Personally I find
> it a better system than mailing lists for a certain types of
> discussion. (But it would not be a good substitute for this list).
> The code for slashdot (slashcode) is opensoucre so it would not
> be too hard to do.

Is there not something out there?
Wow, if not, I agree, there ought to be slashdots and freshmeats and the like
for eco-stuff.

Squishdot is a slashdot clone product for Zope - my sysadmin tried it out,
took him maybe 15 minutes to have it up and going, he was quite impressed
(he's a tech heavy and regular slashdot consumer).
He would probably set one up for you/we/us to play with if enough here want.

> Somehow the XML format seems to be the core of the
> project. I'm presuming that this will be the primary
> format between client and server. With that in place
> different api's will be possible.

Only drawback I know of is overhead (who was it said that quote, something
like "XML is the least efficient way yet developed to move data around"...?). 
Other than that, it's about de rigeur these days to XMLize everything.

There can be "thin" clients where all that processing is done server-side, no?
So that can help with the overhead issue for low-bandwidth connections.



John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Design & Technology Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net