Top Maintenance Priorities

We expect the various features of wiki to work in support of common workflows. We've endured inconvenience in cases where these features are incomplete or unreliable.

I solicit advice from pod members for both priorities of items here and strategies for addressing each in orderly and satisfactory ways.

Let's leave simple and obvious bug fixing to issues in the appropriate repository. Here we seek improvements blocked by some decision making that might be well addressed in this forum.

Let's leave research and development goals to other lists prioritized other ways. New features and applications are surely exciting. Here we want to find energy for erasing the need for workarounds that nobody wants but we all live with all the time.

top priority items in order

Modular Authentication policy and mechanism with documented extension interface and maybe even modules for popular institutional and social network authentication and authorization solutions.

Plugin Catalog starting with removing experimental plugins from github.com/fedwiki and sprucing up those that remain. Also provide an automatic way to observe additional plugins installed on any server and trace them to their source.

more items to consider

Drag and Drop Items within and between pages, across sites and from about pages should always do the right thing and never inadvertently destroy content or fork unwanted pages.

Safe and Familiar Welcome that makes each site look professional to a first time visitor and also avoids the frequent confusion of first time editors.

Maps and Places or more generally infrastructure for geocoordinates. This could include dom signals for spatial data, a plugin to hold points or paths, and better marker and scrolling behavior for the maps we have.

New Site Starter Kit that will guide a new site owner through accepted customizations and common workflows. This could include creating support channels on, say, stack overflow, or some standard practice for reaching a farm's operator.

Clean Fast Install on common machines as commonly configured. Native code dependencies slow installs and produce scary warnings. Optional database adapters and server-side plugins are typical culprits.

Style Guide with well organized, tested and documented css to support it. Revise core and standard plugins to be consistent with the guide.

Touch Support for all common workflows on phones and tablets. This work should proceed by prioritizing activities and then facilitating them with available html5 mechanisms from within a common codebase.

Import, Quotation and Reference with adequate and automatic citation and provenance from a wide and growing number of sources. This should include Transport mechanisms as well as batch import and live sync libraries.