I was editing the wiki of an instance of DrProject, and I said to myself after doing it innumerable amount of times:

This is drudgery.

This is what computers are for; to do all the repetition for us. But at the same time, we must make it easily available for users to use and deploy…

And that’s the hard part. How do you make a multi-delete and auto-update script easy and gracefully available, preferably on the GUI?

Not every user knows how to use shell scripts. Admitedly, I didn’t know what they were four months ago either. And no user would be happy to find out those hours of work could have been automated if they looked in xyz directory or got the sys admin to do it for them.

Allowing a GUI to preform scripted operations may be ugly, but it will help the user manage the wiki, and yet, more operations introduce further complexity into the program.

What to do?