Hi,
On Nov 23, 2010, at 11:42 AM, coldserenity wrote:
 Hi, Devs
    Recently one idea have crossed my mind. Thought that it might be
 interesting to XWiki community.
    It would be nice to implement something like Maven Archetypes, just for
 Wikis. That is a "XWiki Archetype Plug-in".
    Imagine a Wiki for software development project (SDP). Its structure
 might be more or less the same for most of the project. You would have
        * Place for storing development environment description and set-up
        * There should also be a place for developers to store some hints,
 code snippets etc.
        * A place for "User stories" and communications with customers
        * Meetings tracking place (where you keep meeting minutes, IRC logs)
        * List of deliveries and release notes.
    All of the above is something a modern quality-managed project cannot
 survive without. And with XWiki it can be gathered into a set of templates
 in a single *.xar archive like a Maven Archetype.
    At some level it can be done even with existing tools the XWiki
 provides. However it can be extended even more:
        * Archetypes can contain information about plug-ins and extensions
 they depend on. E.g. there may be a separate meeting minutes application
 which needs to be installed for our SDP Archetype example.
        * Parametrized archetypes (e.g. provide project name for SDP
 Archetype)
        * Special UI designed to import an archetype (e.g. choose which
 parts (pages and plug-ins) of the archetype you would want in your Wiki)
        * Special UI designed to search Wiki Archetype repository
        * Special UI for extracting an Archetype from existing Wiki
    Does it sound as a viable user-story? What kinds of other Archetypes you
 can think of? Does it worth the effort, to be able to quickly start-up your
 wikis and have them conform to the same style? 
Yes this is interesting.
Right now have 2 features close to this:
- Wiki templates in XEM
- Template Providers in XE. See
http://code.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Applications/AdministrationApplication
And we're developing the extension manager to handle extensions and their
dependencies.
Another related topic is XWiki Flavors: 
http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-356
Thanks
-Vincent
  Regards,
  Roman