[Helma-dev] Announcing Gobble

[Hannes Wallnoefer]

After a few days of research looking for a piece of wiki software that 
would suit our needs for Helma 2.0 development, I found that most of the 
things are either too hard to install and use, or I just don't like 
them. So today I started development for a new Helma based Wiki 
application that will do quite a few things that Gong is not able to do.

I'm code-naming the project "Gobble", but that may change (tomorrow|next 
week|never). I'm starting from Gong, but I guess not much will remain 
from the original code, which is pretty archaic anyway. I'm also going 
to use AntvilleLib, especially the Html library.

Here's a short description of features I plan to implement with Gobble:

* Multiple spaces/topics and potentially hierarchical site structure, 
including ways to list, re-order, move, x-reference items across spaces.
There will be standard spaces for specific duties, such as /forms  for 
Forms and /users for Users (see below). People will be able to add their 
own spaces, such as /weblog or /helma2.

* Forms, i.e. the possibility to add custom functionality/data to pages.
A form is an object that describes how to edit and display other 
objects, and what properties are available in these object. There will 
be default forms for each space, i.e. the Form form for /forms, the User 
form for /users,  the Weblog form for /weblog etc. Additionally, users 
may be able to choose a form when creating/editing a page.

* User management and permission management (based on the Forms feature).
Users are just pages in Gobble, but they (usually) live in a 
well-defined place and follow a certain form. Because of this, I hope 
that user management code will be very slim and simple in Gobble.

* Rich includes and query tags
Helma macros to build complex pages from other pages.

* Some more smart formatting options, e.g. lists, tables, auto-TOCs

* Basic Weblog functionality including RSS feeds

* Uploads/Page Attachments

Gobble will be released under a Helma-style open source license.

I'll use the Helma-dev list for sending updates and code. I'm pretty 
excited about this. Stay tuned and let me know what you think.

hannes