Q. Are there release archives for easy download without using Subversion?

A. Yes, there are. Visit the rubyforge project page.

Q. How do I create a new page?

A. The easiest way to create a new page is by creating a link to it, like [[my page]], on an existing page, saving that page and then clicking the link to the new page. You'll be put in the editing form for your new page. It is also possible to create a page by visiting a URL of the form http://mysite.com/book/pages/MyNewPage.

Q. How do I create a new book?

A. Used to be that you had to use the Rails console to add a book, but now you can do it directly from Informl. When you first start up Informl, you will be prompted to create your first book. After that, you can create additional books by accessing the http:://mysite/books URL to see a list of current books in your Informl wiki and from there using the "new book" link to create new books. See the page on wiki organization for more info on books, pages and other stuff in Informl.

Q. How does Informl compare to wikiCalc?

A. While both wikiCalc and Informl might be suitable for certain applications, the two are rather different:

• Informl is a wiki with extensions for working with structured data and forms; wikiCalc is a collaborative web-based spreadsheet with a WYSIWYG table editor and calculations.
• Informl lets you create forms using wiki markup. This makes it easy to create web sites potentially used by thousands of people to submit data. WikiCalc really isn't designed for authoring forms, or for collecting input from lots of people, or for working with non-tabular data (eg a marketing survey).
• Informl creates a database table to store the results of each form. This means you can
  • scale up to thousands of entries for each form
  • use the database to search, sort, filter, etc.
  • use Informl in conjunction with other database-savvy tools you already have
• Informl is built with Ruby on Rails and uses ActiveRecord models to manage the data, making integration with other Rails applications natural.
• wikiCalc can bring in live data from sites that provide a web services interface, and it is also possible to embed wikiCalc into other web pages. In the future we might explore using one or both of these interfaces to integrate Informl and wikiCalc. For example, it might be interesting to use wikiCalc to present data collected by Informl.