[Pmwiki-users] Hierarchical Groups?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

When implementing WikiGroups I did think for a while about
implementing hierarchical groups but ultimately decided against it for
two reasons:
  1.  It doesn't seem to add any additional power or flexibility
  2.  It adds complexity in terms of referencing pages in other
      (sub)groups

To see the first point, and to borrow from the example given, instead
of writing Some.Interesting.Group.WikiWord one can just as easily
write SomeInterestingGroup.WikiWord and get basically the same
results and capabilities.

On the second point, the problem comes from trying to decide what one
should do with markup such as "Interesting.Group.WikiWord" inside of
the "Some" group.  If we treat Group.WikiWord links as always being
absolute, then there's not much organizational advantage to having
hierarcies.  If we allow relative links, then there's all sorts of
room for ambiguity unless even more markup is added to resolve it
(which makes things more difficult for naive users).

So, following PmWikiPhilosophy #3, I decided not to try to implement
group hierarchies until someone came up with some definite
requirements where it is needed (at which point we could then develop
an appropriate markup).  Plus for any particular situation that might
make use of hierarchical groups I think there may in fact be better
ways to achieve the outcomes other than using hierarchies.

Finally, it may be possible to modify the $GroupNamePattern to allow
dots in group names, which cosmetically achieves some of what is
desired by Some.Interesting.Group.WikiWord; i.e, this would then be
the "WikiWord" page in the "Some.Interesting.Group" group.  But I
haven't tried this, and I still think it's even easier to simply do
"SomeInterestingGroup.WikiWord" and leave it at that.

I'd welcome any examples or situations that people may have where
hierarchical groups seem to be needed.

Pm





On Saturday, November 29, 2003, 10:09:36 AM, you wrote:

> Hello,
> If I'm not mistaken, PmWiki doesn't currently allow to structure Groups
> hierarchically. That is, it is not possible to create a group like
> Some.Interesting.Group
> So I was wondering, why aren't such "hierarchical" groups implemented in
> PmWiki? It seems (to me now) that implementation would be more-or-less
> trivial (it is seems to be sufficient to allow the dots or / in group names
> and perhaps add some special handling for the case of uploads).
> Such organization of groups would allow to structure Wiki pages better.

> Are there are some conceptual reasons for not implementing such a feature
> that I have overlooked?

> Konstantin.


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