Turtles and Wikis and Perl, oh my!
I'm not sure what's crazier: the fact that I'm writing my own Wiki/CMS, or that it's only taken me about 3-4 days (and just the evenings, really) to get a fairly nicely working system together. In the Perl community, it's said you know you've reached a certain level of proficiency when you try and write your own templating system. I wonder what it says about me that I'm writing a program that allows you to pretty flexibly combine a whole bunch of templating and markup systems (currently, Template Toolkit, TAL, Text::Template, Wiki markup, Markdown, and of course our good friends HTML and plain text).
The basic idea came from looking at PmWiki's use of a flat file database to hold its content, and thinking “How far could I run with that idea?” What I have ended up with is a system where everything (including the main site template and the page editing form) is editable through the browser interface. There are of course some dangers to this approach (e.g., screw up the page editing form and all of a sudden you can't correct anything through the browser anymore), but I'm really interested in seeing just how far I can push this idea.
There are three more major features that need to get implemented. One is some sort of authentication mechanism. The second is attaching binary content (mostly images, but being able to attach PDFs or the like could be useful as well). The third is some sort of versioning of the page content (so you can easily rollback changes; this is a must-have Wiki feature). For the versioning I plan to use SVN. Your set of pages is your repository, and when you edit a page, you get a private working copy of that page. This way, all the hard stuff about changeset tracking and conflict management is solved.
And the working title of this project: TurtleWiki. Because, you know, it's turtles all the way down!