[Pmwiki-users] Feature Suggestion

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at sci.tamucc.edu
Fri Mar 7 16:10:38 CST 2003


For intermaps:

UseMod and Meatball had a lot of discussion about wiki-editable 
intermaps, primarily in the context of having a global InterMap page 
that contained the intermap link mappings.  There were several pros 
and cons to this approach; but PmWiki's group structure alleviates 
a number of the cons since the intermap definitions are no longer
limited to a single global intermap page.

To avoid the "line oriented" markup that Scott proposed, I'd counter-propose
markups such as:

   [%Abbrev0 http://www.replacement.org/url/prefix0%]
   [%Abbrev1 http://www.replacement.org/url/prefix1%]

   =intermap Abbrev0 http://www.replacement.org/url/prefix0
   =intermap Abbrev1 http://www.replacement.org/url/prefix1

or something along these lines.  I think this can probably be handled 
as a local customization w/o modifying pmwiki.php, although it
may require some tricky handling of the $LinkPatterns array to make
sure the patterns stay in the correct sequence.

For shortcuts:

On a similar thought, and starting down a very slippery slope that
I've been quite reluctant to examine, does PmWiki need author-defined 
generic abbreviation capabilities?  (Perhaps this is what Scott
meant by "shortcuts"?)  While writing the documentation
trail pages and other pages I've sometimes found myself wishing to be 
able to simply write something like [%trail%] and have that be 
automatically converted to %trail%<<|PmWiki.DocumentationIndex|>>, 
but not have to hard-code this as a local customization to PmWiki.
I.e., enable full-text shortcuts to be defined within a wiki page such as 
PmWiki.GroupHeader (as opposed to just intermap shortcuts 
But I'm *very* worried that this "macro" capability will be just the 
beginning of a very slippery slope that will ultimately lead to the 
exclusion of naive authors--i.e., in addition to learning the 
TextFormattingRules, they'd also have to be aware of all of the 
author-defined custom markups that were generated.

Any comments, ideas?  Am I imagining a problem that doesn't exist, or
is it real?

Pm



On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:

> In the interest of favoring authors, how about a way to include
> "intermaps" (I'll be calling these shortcuts from now on as the word
> "intermap" doesn't make much sense to me anymore) in wiki pages?  For
> instance, say the ISBN shortcut wasn't in the intermap.txt nor in the
> localmap.txt or you want ISBN to be a shortcut to Barnes&Noble rather
> than whatever the PmWikiAdmin has decided it should be a shortcut to.
> If there were a way to specify a shortcut using PmWikiMarkup, then the
> author of a page could define shortcuts where it makes sense.
> 
> The only syntactic way that springs to mind right off is something
> like (the all too line oriented):
> 
> [%
> Abbrev0 FullyExpandedThing0
> Abbrev1 FullyExpandedThing1
> %]
> 
> s/%/<some other character>/   maybe a colon would work.
> 
> This could also allow shortcuts for a whole group by making it part of
> the GroupAttributes page (for instance) and have pmwiki read that page
> for shortcuts after reading intermap.txt. The rule would be that page
> specific shortcuts override group specific shortcuts override
> intermap.txt.
> 
> -Scott
> 





More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list