Re: org-mode based groupware wiki

[Torsten Wagner <torsten.wagner@gmail.com>]

Dear Wally,
Dear Eric,

thanks for the replies and sorry for the long delay. Interesting that
there is an update on org-ruby just in the middle of my decision
pathway ;).
Until know I thought org-ruby is pretty much orphaned and that by time
it will start to fail on the growing changes done in org-mode.

On the other hand with all the help on the list I got org-ehtml
working now. It was indeed a missing requirement call (require 'assoc)
did the job.
Now I was able to test both gollumn and org-ehtml it puts me into a dilemma.

From user (esp. non-org-user) perspective gollumn seems much more
attractive. The editor is more user friendly for non-orgers and the
integrated git versioning is working pretty stable. Gollumn itself
seems to run on the shoulder of giants and keep itself rather small.
Overall, a quite positive impression. However, it depends on the
org-ruby package, which still understand only a subset of org-modes
features. It seems to me somehow a hunting task to keep track with the
fast pace of the org-mode development. This does not only include new
features but also slight differences between the original org-mode
export and the org-ruby parsing. It might be as simple as an extra
blank here or there, which can be quite troublesome form time to time.

e-html works great too. It is somehow a little bit more a web-based
editable org-mode, whereas gollumn is a wiki-system which supports
org-mode. org-html would do a perfect job for myself if I am the only
user for this wiki. However, I frighten that non-orgers have a harder
time to use it compare to gollumn. For some reason which I can't
explain, I feel a bit nervous about running  an emacs session
continuously on my server to provide a website. Not sure where the
fear comes from. Maybe it is just because of my bad elisp skills ;)
Overall, it works now and it does a good job but I can't avoid the
feeling that all of it might be a bit fragile (as it might brake on
arbitrarily changes on elnode, emacs, org-mode). However, it has the
great benefit to be 100% up-to-date with whatever org-mode supports
now or in the future and the output of a static page would be the same
as the dynamic page. I even could create PDF versions if needed e.g.
for static archiving.

I do not exactly now the intentions for org-ruby. Maybe Wally like to
elaborate on this. Maybe org-ruby can catch up faster with the new
exporter features of org-mode now that org-mode gets a more
standardized syntax.

At the moment, for me the best would be to combine both worlds
somehow. I notice that gollum allows to define/call new parsers. Would
it be possible to call emacs and start and html export on changes
saved in the webbrowser? In other words why not calling emacs directly
to do the html export? I would assume that the code which has to be
added to gollum would be minimal and the same would be true for the
few lines of lisp code to create the html page.

That would allow me to use the non-orger friendly gollumn and get the
same accurate result as I do with org-ehtml. However, it would only
call emacs from time to time instead of a constant emacs session
running.

Maybe this (sorry) very long mail helps me to get the best of both worlds ;)

Thanks for help and support

Torsten






On 16 October 2013 19:52, Waldemar Quevedo <waldemar.quevedo@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Torsten,
>
>> - Enhance org-ruby?
> I would be glad to help out in this regard. About the completeness of the
> implementation of the Org mode ruby parser, it would be very helpful for me
> to have a set of examples that describe how each one of the features of Org
> mode Emacs exporter should be rendered in to HTML.
>
> I tried to do some work about this some time ago to identify the coverage of
> Org ruby HTML exporting compared to the Org mode Emacs exporter:
> https://github.com/wallyqs/org-mode-features/blob/master/features.org
> https://github.com/bdewey/org-ruby/tree/master/spec/html_examples/
> Is there a set of examples of all the features from Org mode anywhere?
>
> By the way, recently Github has upgraded to the 0.8.1 version of the
> org-ruby gem, so Org mode rendering to HTML should have improved a lot
> (previous version they used was 0.5.3 so it took a while for them to
> evaluate upgrading the gem).
> https://github.com/github/markup/issues/186#issuecomment-25342870
>
> Until I have identified the coverage, my current approach with developing
> Org ruby is 'on demand', so if you find and issue please submit to the
> issues tracker on Github: https://github.com/bdewey/org-ruby/issues
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Wally
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 8:57 PM, Torsten Wagner <torsten.wagner@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>> recently I discovered gollumn [1] and was amazed to see that there is a
>> software which allows non-orgers to work with / read my org-files and which
>> even use git as the backend to get all save and nice together, even if
>> working concurrently on the same files.
>>
>> I was wondering, because I never read about gollum in this ML and my
>> search only revealed a very short three year old thread between Bastien and
>> Eric Schulte. Despite that many of us was asking of possible ways how to use
>> org as a groupware like environment. I guess this topic was discussed even
>> more frequently over the last three years.
>> Unfortunately, the main drawback, the usage of org-ruby [2] as org-mode
>> parser still remains. I frighten that org-ruby only works on a small subset
>> of the org-mode syntax and that even this might be a bit out-of-date. As far
>> as I understood, org-mode in the meantime switched to a new exporter [3] and
>> we got org-elements [4] and a heavy work towards standardization thanks to
>> Nicolas Goaziou.
>>
>> What would be the best way to get the best out of the gollum idea and the
>> new org-mode capabilities?
>>
>> - Skip gollumn and use (an updated) blorgit [5] (Does it have editor
>> functionality?) ?
>> - Enhance org-ruby?
>> - Write a small script which creates a native html export from org-mode
>> and hook this into gollumn? However, that would require emacs and org-mode
>> being installed on the server side.
>>
>> For me gollums most important feature would be that people could use their
>> web-browser and edit org-files. It might not be the most comfortable way of
>> editing a org-file but a simple adding of a row into a table or rephrasing
>> or adding a paragraph would be totally possible. It even might help to
>> introduce people into using emacs and org-mode.
>>
>> It would be really nice to have such an easy access to org-files. Even
>> hard-core orgers might like the idea to e.g. access and lightly modify there
>> org-files on-the-go via smartphones and tablets without running a full emacs
>> session. (I am aware of Mobileorg ;) )
>>
>> I got a bit into detail here to hopefully kick-off some discussions.
>>
>> All the best
>>
>> Torsten
>>
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/gollum/gollum
>> [2] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-ruby.html
>> [3] http://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-export-reference.html
>> [4] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-api/org-element-api.html
>> [5] http://orgmode.org/worg/blorgit.html
>
>