Folks:

I’d like to create a wiki-like directory with a very specific requirement: When creating a new page, the user must enter information in a form. Something like this:

http://vinismo.com/en/Special:Form/Wine

This example is run off of MediaWiki with a special add-on. MediaWiki seems like overkill for what I’d like to do. Can the EE wiki module be tweaked so that a form can be used to build wiki pages? Or can the pages module be customized to do this?

I’m considering EE because this site will also have blog and a few other widgets and I’d rather not try to integrate into a standalone wiki.

Hi porthos,

Yes, this can be done.  The functionality is not built-in as far as I know, but if you’re familiar with PHP, there’s a number of hooks that you can develop an extension to take advantage of.

If you’re comfortable allowing your visitors to access the ExpressionEngine control panel, it would also be trivial to set up a weblog with fields matching the ones in your MediaWiki special page.  However, this would be set up separately from the wiki module.

Thanks Jesse.

I have fooled around quite a bit with actionscript but I’m not much for PHP. Time to learn, I suppose. Just to be sure that I’m not barking up the wrong tree, the extension would do the following:

The user clicks a button to add a new page to the wiki.
A page with a form appears.
The user completes the required fields.
The user clicks a submit button.
The wiki page is created. The page name is based on whatever the user entered in one of the form fields.

Possible, correct?

Thanks again.

Hi Summer Student,

You don’t need to do that with the Wiki module. As Jesse B. said you might better use an ee weblog for that.
Instead of giving users control panel access to fill in the requested fields you can also use a fully customisable Stand-Alone Entry Form (SAEF). That might do the job easier and better. As far as I know, you won’t need nor actionscript neither PHP to set up the SAEF.

From your site, it looks like the form is just an interface to creating a skeleton wiki page.  If that’s the case, and you require others to be able to edit the page, a SAEF won’t work for you because it doesn’t allow editing existing wines, only adding new ones.

I have not actually tried it, but I believe a wiki extension will be capable of performing the task you’re attempting.

Good luck!

Thanks qlas and Jesse B.

Jesse: You answered my next question which was if a SAEF would create a page that could be editable by anyone. Apparently not but I’ve got EE Core running locally and I’ll see how things go. I’ve used WordPress and Textpattern extensively and this will be a chance to add another CMS to the portfolio. If all goes well, I’ll spring for the $10 trial and see what the wiki can do.

Thanks again folks.