Please review custom Wiki
 

Hey people, I've created my own custom wiki, and I'm looking for beta testers mainly to break it! But I'm also interested in what you think of the design, and general comments about the site.

So I'd really appreciate it if you could take a look at my site and tell me what you think. Create some pages, and generally be destructive (don't worry, it's all backed up!)

It's written in PHP and uses xml and text files as its database. It utilises the PEAR Text_Wiki package, but is still in development. When it's done I'm thinking of trying to release it open source, when that relies on getting it right first!!!

Thanks people, looking forward to seeing your destruction tomorrow :p !

I added (tried) a new page under hardware and received an error:

Tried to create another new page and it wouldn't let me at all.

Other than that, it doesn't seem too bad. I would change the background colour personally as it seems to bright.

XML and text files is... well in my opinion a bad choice, especially for a wiki. I have just had a real bad prjoect with them and learned the hard way (I will never use that method of storing data again, Im loving MySQL). Suit yourself though. Looks good, nice job :)

It's not so much suit yourself, than suit the hosting companies crappy cheap hosting!! But yeah, if I had a choice I'd move away from flat file stuff, but my hands are ties.

I admittedly didn't try testing the functionality, but I'd recommend that you standardize your CSS throughout the site. If you look at this image There's 3 different styles for links. They should all be the same. And in this image you can see that the mouse isn't actually over the link anymore, but there's no obvious change in the style (keeping the highlighting makes it look like the link is still selected). Admittedly, I had to draw the mouse location back in since my screenshot app removed it, but the mouse did look the same for both locations - meaning the status bar was the only way to tell if I was over the link or not. This phenomenon also occurred with the left navigation bar as well (the links circled in red on the first image).

(At the moment, for some reason CSS from flickr is ironically not working on my browser and it's overlaying the thumbnails over the images I linked to; hopefully it's not doing that when you look at them, so you can clearly see what I mean)

Yeah, I've been looking at that, how can I make the entire <li> clickable? Wrapping <a> tags around it gives some standards error or other on the W3C validator...

Flat file, while not the best choice, can be made a bit better if you add some encryption, for security's sake.

Could I ask why you think that I need encryption? There is a text file for each article, which simply contains the words, and an xml file which contains the name, source file (name hashed to prevent overwriting of needed files - maybe this is what you mean?) and keywords for each article. It's not as though these files contain sensitive material.