Using Wicked

Quick Tips

Wicked is a wiki tool that lives in the zope environment and therefore plays well with Share-IT. You may add a wiki page by selecting "wicked doc" from the "add to folder" drop down at the top of the content area of this page.

Once inside a wiki page, editing is simple. One neat tip is to use blah^[+] syntax to link to something on the site ("blah" would be the title of the content item to which you wish to link).

Detailed Documentation

Premise

Wiki does two things really well: convenient document creation, immediate interlinking of documents.  To leverage these features, wikis have a nasty tendency to aggregate random other features in a haphazard way.

wicked reduces 'wiki' to a feature of content by stripping away everything except for for creating, tracking, and managing wiki links within a CMF site.  wicked will yield all other feature unto the CMS.

Goals

• Easy link based creation of content
• Easy intuitive linking of content by explicit wiki links
• Reference system for relating interlinked content

Links

The wicked linking mechanism is very simple.  All wicked linking is explicit; links are specified by enclosing content text in double parentheses^[+] .  A wicked link will resolve under one of the following conditions:

1. a matching id within the same folder
2. a matching title within the same folder
3. a matching id somewhere else in the site
4. a matching title somewhere else in the site

In cases where there are duplicate matches (possible w/ 2, 3, or 4), then the earliest created piece of content will be considered to match.  Id matches are case sensitive, title matches are not.

Note that wicked links will match against ANY content that is in your Plone site, NOT just other content of the same type.  Also note that wicked linking mechanism works equally well when used for plain text, structured text, or HTML content, and whether using a regular browser text box, a browser-based WYSIWYG editor such as Kupu or Epoz, or an external editor.

When a wicked link does not resolve via any of the mechanisms specified above, it will generate an add link in the form of a plus sign ("+") after the wicked link text.  Clicking on this link will create a new piece of content of the same type as the document being viewed, in the same folder.

In order to be correct in real-time, wicked performs link resolution at render time.  This may, however, become expensive when there are thousands of pages and thousands of wicked links on a busy site. Also, once a link has been resolved, it should stay resolved until a user changes the text within the parentheses^[+] or the target of the link is removed.

'wicked' uses a sophisticated system to cache links and prevent link breakage by normal content managements activities such as renaming and cut & pasting.

Once wicked resolves a link, either by dynamic lookup on set or get, or by the explicit creation of content through a wicked link, information about this link is saved as an annotation on the content holding the link.

wicked subscribes to modification and deletion events for all content that is a link target. If a piece of content is renamed, cut & pasted, moved inside a container, updated or deleted, annotations are updated so that links do not break and remain resolved to the appropriate targets.