Heh. This will teach me to read dates carefully. This only just showed up in my aggregator, but it's 2 weeks old. Dohh.

Learning Seaside announced a Seaside talk by Lukas Renggli, the author the wiki system described below. Sounds interesting, and Annecy is apparently just 30 minutes by car from Geneva.

Where: LISTIC - ESIA

LISTIC - ESIA

5, chemin de Bellevue

Domaine universitaire d'Annecy-Le-Vieux

FRANCE

When: Mercredi 18 Janvier 2006 a 18h

Un petit apero sera servi donc envoye un mail pour dire si vous comptez venir a sduca@univ-savoie.fr

Pier -- A Meta-Described Collaborative Content Management System

Abstract

Wikis are often implemented using string-based approaches to parse and generate their pages. While such approaches work well for simple wikis, they hamper the customization and adaptability of wikis to the variety of end-users when more sophisticated needs are required, such as different output formats, user-interfaces, wiki management and security policies.

Pier 2 (smallwiki.unibe.ch) is the second version of a fully object-oriented implementation of a wiki. Pier is written with objects from the top to the bottom and it can be customized easily to accommodate new needs. In addition, SmallWiki is based on a powerful meta-description called Magritte that allows one to create user-interface elements easily. In this talk I will present some of the unique features of Pier, such as how pages can be composed and integrated into other web-applications. Furthermore I will create a small extension to demonstrate how to customize and add new functionality easily