We finally moved the open community guide to London (previously known as grubstreet) from UseModWiki over to OpenGuides. Wow. It only took just under a year from deciding to rewrite UseModWiki in maintainable Perl to coming up with a complete specialised city guide application.
There are three Open Guides online now:
More info is available at the OpenGuides website - if your city doesn't have an Open Guide then why not set one up? It will work right out of the box for any UK city (after you configure it, of course). For cities in other countries, all the features should work fine apart from the location stuff — offers of assistance in sorting that would be greatly appreciated.
OpenGuides is based on CGI::Wiki and was written by me, Earle Martin, and Ivor Williams.
Re:Looks good but ...
Kake on 2003-06-27T15:42:52
Oh, shiny. I might pinch your location stuff. Which other features did you think we might use in OpenGuides?
Re:Looks good but ...
autarch on 2003-06-27T16:59:36
Well, there's a lot. The numeric ratings are a good thing, I think. The search features are pretty fancy. For example, you can search for entries that are open for the next X minutes, and there's lots of other details that are searchable, like smoking/non-smoking, wheelchair-accessible, etc.
Also, any logged-in user can access the editing forms for an entry, but unless they are the "owner" of the location, or the entry itself, their changes are saved as a suggestion. Then the real owner(s) (or admin) can accept or reject the suggestion.Re:Looks good but ...
Kake on 2003-06-30T13:04:12
I've never got on with numeric ratings — I just don't seem to find them useful at all. I'd take a patch to optionally add them to OpenGuides, but I'm unlikely to do it myself.
The smoking/non-smoking kind of stuff is done with Categories in OpenGuides; we had a script to search for food places/pubs on multiple categories, but it was specific to the UseMod version of the guide and so needs rewriting for the OpenGuides one. Any node can be added to any number of categories, so you'll be able to search on things like "find me a pub in Holborn that does food and has a beer garden". (Normally I hate saying things like "I'm going to write something to do this" before I've actually started, but this is a porting issue, not writing from scratch, so I think I can get away with it.)
"Open for the next X minutes" is definitely useful. The semantic web people are interested in this too: http://esw.w3.org/topic/OpeningHoursUseCase.
As for the suggestion/real owner thing, that's not something I'm interested in for this project. One of the main reasons I like wikis is that you don't need to faff with authentication. It's a core part of the other main thing I'm playing with, though — mapping London as a graph — but that's because of the legal complications of aggregating mapping data.
Thank you for the ideas! I'll have more time from next week to play about with your thing.
