Since the Wiki was launched in late Summer 2003, very little has been changed except adding a simple CSS stylesheet. Since the functionality of the Wiki is one thing that users certainly cannot change, we're going to explain what changes are happening and why here - if you disagree then you can comment on them from the "comments on this page" link below.
Changes are taking place in preperation for a possible Amiga Wiki relaunch, to coincide with the more general usage of OS4. Features that have been looked at include:
The Front Page
Before, there was a large amount of wasted space on the right, and users with smaller screen resolutions would not see the "entry points" but only "Wiki info". We felt that many users would like to start by reading the Wiki instead of editing it, and the "entry points" menu was moved up to make it more prominant. These two sections have also been renamed "Main Topics" and "Help and Information" - hopefully more intuitive for the casual user (who cetainly won't know what a "Wiki" is).
Some code has also been added to allow the different elements of the front page to be moved around and styled with CSS, eliminating the white space problem, and drawing attention to the MOTD. Non-CSS browsers will see the old layout, however the "Main Topics" menu will still be above where it used to be.
If we can get the Perl XML module up and going, the RSS newsfeed from a site like AW or AO may be included, but unobtrusively at the bottom so not to confuse the site layout, yet to give newbies to the platform some idea of current events.
Update: The two-column layout was in use for a while, but has now been abandoned in favour of a pervasive sidebar. A newsfeed has been added to replace it, with a feed of recent changes.
CSS/Themes
Untill AmiZilla or AWeb KHTML is released, Amiga browsers cannot see these features, however old-style formatting such as the <font> tag will not be implemented - it'd involve massive re-writes of formatting code, annoy other users and, besides, CSS is the future. Hopefully the site will seem attractive to PC users searching for information about the platform. A little arrow now appears at the right of external links - this should be a bit more intuitive than the [bracketed external links].
Update
The old CSS theme made links bold when the mouse rolled over them - this could move text around and look messy. Links are now highlighted by inversing the colours - let me know if you think its better on the Feedback page. See also: CSS Issues.
Comments
A newly activated feature - click "comments on the page" to add a comment on the page! Use this for general discussion of the topic or if you'd like to say "Is this part of the article incorrect" (if you know it is, just edit the page!).
Update: The bottom of pages will now tell you how many comments have already been written on a page.
Avatars
An extension can be loaded that enables users to place avatars by their comments, much like a forum. This was rejected because:
- Avatars take up a lot of space
- On non-CSS browsers the avatars appear on a seperate line, taking up even more space
- They give more of an impression that the person posting is someone from another site, but since there is no login (like ANN) this is misleading
- There's no facility to upload avatars - users would probably all email the admin asking for hosting or steal bandwidth of community sites like AO or AW
Smilies
Smilies may be implemeted for 
etc, but these should only be used on comments pages.
Update: Smilies are now a fully implented feature - see Wiki Help for more details
"AmigaLink"
A link at the bottom of the page (perhaps called "AmigaLink") that will simply take you to a page where you can search for the current page title on AmiNet, AmigaShare, Google, BTTR etc. The idea is to tie together the existing information systems much better. We're currently considering how to do this.
Update: A preliminary system is now installed. I may investigate the possibility of attempting to parse the output so the list of sites from google, downloads from BTTR etc appears here. If this isn't practical then at least the arrangement of the links will be tidied up with some CSS. I also need to look into the search strings used by some sites like OS4Depot.
Pre-written text
A system may be impemented that for some bits of commonly used text you can automatically have a paragraph inserted, like in wikipedia - for instance, writing "**STUB**" or something would insert a message saying that the page was a stub.
Update: This is now implemented - see Wiki Help for details of usage.
Hierarchical page groups
I'm looking into a way to have pages in groups and subgroups. At the top of "Zool", for instance, would be a link like "Amiga Software -> Games"
Update: Done
CSS on front page...
...is a mess on anything except Mozilla and non-CSS complient browsers. I'll probably completely reorganise this somethime.
Update: See CSS Issues
Soapbox
A group of pages for people to write articles about anything
Update: Implemented - see Soapbox
Automated Aminet mirror search
Links to Aminet files will be entered in a special format, so users can choose their desired mirror from a dropdown menu. Perhaps this idea could be used for all files where there are mirrors (eg on OS4Depot etc as well).
Wiki on new server
26/07/05 - The wiki is now on a new domain (www.amigawiki.com) and server, provided by Amiga.org. This'll allow us far more room to expand than the 50Mb AmigaCentre.co.uk hosting. Requests to amigacentre.co.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl will be redirected, as will parameters passed to the script, but I don't know how to pass wiki.pl/Amiga_Software etc - please leave a comment if you can help. The old server has been locked and will be gradually phased out as people update their links.
Automatic sourcecode syntax highlighting
28/07/05 - Now implemented (the most useful languages being c/c++) Surround your code with <source cpp> </source> (or "java", "scheme" etc).
AmigaGuide file generation
A long-term aim is to write a program to automatically convert the entire wiki into an AmigaGuide file for offline usage. I've started writing a program to do this and it doesn't seem as if it'll be too hard - I'll post a teaser screenshot probably in the next week or two.
Update: OK then, have a very early screenshot
Update: The application is now complete (although there are some features that could do with improving, such as a parser for table markup). I'll upload an offline edition of the Wiki to Aminet once I feel it's at an acceptable quality.
See Amiga Wiki Offline Edition
Wiki now a lot better under AmigaOS browsers
I've added tags so that non-CSS browsers can get the right colours for text etc. AmigaOS users can click a link on the frontpage to see the sidebar as a frame (although this will be duplicated at the bottom of the screen - I'm working on this). I'll also see if a cookie can be used to select whether the user wants the Wiki to appear in a frameset.
Images
A small number of images would definitely enrich many pages, and in theory you can display an image from an external site. In practice, we don't permit this - as well as copyright concerns and "bandwidth stealing", the rest of the web is liable to change, breaking the links. Instead, we'd rather have a Wikipedia-style system, where images can be uploaded to our server under an open license. Oddmuse (the Wiki engine we use) does have this capability, and we will consider adding this feature subject to bandwidth/storage space constraints.
Canonical Names
We're working to remove the rule where pagenames should start with a capital letter (this mucks up the titles of products like microgolded). I am attempting to get Xyz? to link to xyz? (for a reason why this can be an issue, see this Wikipedia page).
Update: This feature now works (see mIcRoGoLdEd) however links to MicroGoldED will still point there as the page exists - I attempted a manual deletion (from the filesystem) however this simply confused the engine. I believe I have found out how to manually delete pages correctly, and will check this before attempting to convert pages such as vbcc (otherwise there would be no automatic redirect).
Update: Done. Users are now free to create pages such as vbcc or microgolded. Please inform the webmaster if you are converting a page to a different title (e.g. "VBCC" to "vbcc") - I can then delete the original page, and this new extension will ensure that existing links point to the new page.
Update: There is an issue resolving lowercase names to uppercase ones - e.g. amigoid does not resolve to the existing Amigoid page. This is being looked at...
Spam detection
28/03/06 - After a recent spate of spam attacks I've added Joey to automate the removal process (before anything is even written to disk). Joey has caught some spams already and seems to be functioning fine, although I can tweak him if needed.
