Presentations in DokuWiki
I just added a new feature to DokuWiki called “pluggable renderers”. In case you don't know: DokuWiki parses Wiki syntax into an instruction array which then is “rendered” to the desired output format. This output format is usually the XHTML to display a nicely formatted Wiki page. Pluggable renderers allow plugin authors to write their own renderer to output any format they want. This adds another bit of flexibility to DokuWiki.
So what has this to do with presentations? I will answer that in a minute. Just one more excursion.
Eric Meyer created a completely web based presentation system named S5 1) a while ago. It uses some CSS and JavaScript magic and a single specially formatted XHTML page to create a Power Point like slide show. This is great because you don't need to rely on any presentation binaries (Power Point viewer, Open Office Impress…) - just open a web browser and you're ready to present.
There was just one thing that annoyed me: creating a presentation manually was a tedious task. See where we get here?
That's right. I have a perfect tool to generate XHTML already. It's called DokuWiki. So why not combine both tools? With pluggable renderers I just needed to inherit from the default XHTML renderer and override a few methods to output the XHTML needed by S5. The result is the S5 DokuWiki Plugin.
I recommend to have a look at the example presentation. It's just a standard DokuWiki page, but the ~~SLIDESHOW~~ macro in it's source adds the icon in the upper right corner – click it and you're looking at the same page as presentation.