User guide: Anwiki concepts

Anwiki differs from existing wiki engines and CMS not only for it's multilingual features, but also for the main concepts it relies on.
It's important to understand these concepts to fully benefit from Anwiki potential.

Anwiki *can* manipulate structured contents

Existing Wiki engines and CMS

Most of wiki engines and CMS manage non-structured contents. Edited contents are edited exactly as they will be displayed.

• Good points: quick and easy to use.
• Drawback: usages are limited.
  • Formatting informations are mixed with the content itself, so you can't easily change the layout.
  • You can't reuse your contents on multiple locations of your website, you have to duplicate it (and to translate it again, if it's a multilingual website).

A few advanced CMS (such as eZ publish) allow structured contents management.

• Good points: unlimited content usages:
  • You can define custom structures of contents. Then, you can edit structured content, typing the piece of content in the dedicated field.
  • Layout informations are separated from contents. You can easily change the layout by editing templates.
  • Contents can be reused all over your website, and it can be formatted in different ways.
• Drawbacks: complex to use, and it takes time to define content structures and templates.

Anwiki gives you the choice

Anwiki keeps the best of the two worlds:

• Structured contents:
  • Anwiki ships with a set of common Content Classes which can be immediately used for your website:
    • page : title, head, body
    • news : title, introduction, body, categories/tags
    • navigation menu : main links, sub links
    • ...
  • You can download/share more Content Classes and examples of uses with the community.
  • Developers can define their own Content Classes for highly structured contents (PHP skills required).
  • Recommanded for: multiple contents having the same structure and layout.
  
  
• Unstructured contents:
  • Using the Content Class "page", you can mix HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP code just like editing any HTML/PHP file.
  • Recommanded for: small websites, quick projects, specific pages with unique design.

Features and Actions

Each Anwiki feature is handled by an Action. Each action can be enabled or disabled, and granted to specific users.
This modular architecture allows adding new features to Anwiki by developing or downloading more "actions" from the community.
There are two types of "actions":

• Global actions: actions which are not related to a specific content
  Example: site map, list of untranslated pages, user preferences, user identification...
  
  
• Content actions: actions which are directly related to a specific content
  Example: content creation, content edition, content translation, content renaming...