Community Vectorworks Wiki

[Christiaan]

Something I've always wished we had is a Wiki area of the forum that the community could use to create its own resources.

 

Perhaps by way of the Pages feature of Invision Board? But to be successful it would need to be open Wiki style of creation and editing rather than a top-down bureaucratic process, and the problem with the Pages feature in Invision Board is that it doesn't have any moderating features that I can see.

 

An example of what such a feature could be used for is to take a thread like this, distilling and elaborating on the answers to create a page explaining all the different resources one might encounter on the internet and how they relate to creating Textures in Vectorworks:

 

[Tom W.]

This is such a great request. There are so many talented + informed people here on the Forum it would be amazing if they could channel their knowledge into an authoritative + definitive wiki-style encyclopedia. The Forum is brilliant but it is not always the most efficient or effective way to find info + get to the nub of an issue.

[Christiaan]

I've had a poke around the Invision Board community forum to get a better idea of whether Pages is suitable. It's not ideal because it's very basic. Nothing like MediaWiki. But it would offer a few benefits.

 

Option 1: Use Pages for Invision Board

1. Engagement would probably be better because the pages would be fully integrated with the forum (instead of a separate URL)
2. Maintenance would be simpler than maintaining a separate Wiki. And there's always the chance that Invision will update the Pages feature to provide a richer feature set, at which point we could go back and edit existing pages.
3. There is a plugin that enables Wiki-style editing (i.e. it allows any user to edit any unlocked item): https://invisioncommunity.com/files/file/8764-wiki-markup-for-pages/
4. We could probably trial this option pretty easily with a few users first.

Option 2: Set up Wiki using MediaWiki at wiki.vectorworks.net

1. The main prerequisite for this to work well would be integration with forum login credentials. Logging into the forum would log you into the wiki.
2. This option would a provide a full-featured Wiki with no formatting limitations.
3. It would provide full-featured community moderation features, meaning everybody would be able to contribute.
4. The main cons are that it would be a separate resource that VW needs to maintain, and that it would be at a different URL than the forum, risking lack of engagement.

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/454180-using-pages-as-a-wiki/

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/463509-pages-wiki-style-permissions-tables/