[Pmwiki-users] File upload feature discussion

[Davis, James C.]

I went back and reviewed my first argument, and I realized that really I
meant that redundancy was a problem from the user's prospective (having to
upload the same file again and again) rather than the administrator's. I
think in this way redundancy is a problem because the pmwiki philosophy is
to make things easy for authors. There has to be a way to upload a file once
and use it on many pages. The original argument was more that there needed
to be a mechanism to allow the user to not have to be redundant rather than
prevent redundancy. I think I was just in an argumentative mood when I got
off on the "all those redundant files will take up too much space" argument,
so I'll rephrase why I think association with WikiGroups is best.

A file is much more likely to be used in more than one page in the same
group that pages in different groups. The likelihood of name collisions is
very small within the same group (it's bad design to have multiple files
with the same name and different meaning or purpose anyways). Pages could
then easily include files without a complex structure to reference the file
(just the file name, like: [[$upload:filename]]. Files from other groups
could be included in the same way you link to pages in other groups. This
would be very intuitive because it is the way WikiWord links work.

Thus,

[[$upload:myfile]] would link to a file in the same group as the current
page

and

[[$upload:OtherGroup/myfile]] would link to a file in OtherGroup

The underlying way that files and their associations are actually stored is
left up to the developer.

James Davis
Network Manager
College of Business
Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi
(361) 825-5926
jdavis at cob.tamucc.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick R. Michaud [mailto:pmichaud at sci.tamucc.edu]
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 5:25 PM
To: Davis, James C.
Cc: 'pmwiki-users at pmichaud.com'
Subject: RE: [Pmwiki-users] File upload feature discussion


On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Davis, James C. wrote:
> 
> Proposed solution: associate files with groups only
> 
> This would minimize redundancy, but still make it easy to link files into
a
> page.

Perhaps, but I still think that redundancy is a "non-issue" as far as
PmWiki is concerned.  I can't imagine the general user uploading an
identical 
image to every page, especially if the wiki syntax gives them a convenient 
shortcut to include/refer to attachments of other pages.  

> It seems the point of the upload feature is mainly to allow images the be
> uploaded right? Maybe pmwiki should examine the file that a user attempts
to
> upload and reject it if it is not in a valid image format. 

Although I can imagine that a primary use for the upload is for images,
I don't think that it will be used exclusively for images.  In the cases
I have, I know that it would be used for uploading of PDFs, 
PowerPoint slide shows, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents, to name
a few.  So, PmWiki would not itself limit the file types, although a
site administrator would be able to enforce such limits.

Pm