Wikis

One of my big projects at work right now is refining the user interface for a wiki service at Ohio State.

A wiki is a kind of website that allows users to add and edit content collectively (read more about wikis), so it's important to make it easy for visitors to understand what they are allowed to do. It's also important to our users who set up their own wiki spaces in our service to change the interface to show their own personalities.

I started my interface improvements by activating several theme add-ins written by other people for the wiki software. These themes offer variety so all the wiki spaces don't have to look exactly the same. Here's an example of one that let's space owners change the background color:

I've also been working with a templating language called Velocity to restructure the wiki's introduction page, or Dashboard. Because we offer wiki space to a lot of unrelated projects, the list of recent changes for all wikis that normally appears isn't very helpful!