[Pmwiki-users] Re: Add a date/time option for viewing an old version of a page

[chr@home.se]

On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> This is PITS:00220 -- cast your vote there.  :-)
> 
> I hadn't thought of making them sticky -- that's worth thinking about
> (and placing a note in the pits entry).  Plus I think there should be 
> a way to specify both date and time in a single parameter -- i.e.,  
> 
>     when=2004-12-01+20:03
>     when=2004-12-01
>     when=20:03
>     when=12-01+20:03

I've cast my vote and added a note to the PITS entry.

> It might even be worth looking at accepting several date/time formats
> (e.g., from any standard date/time parsing that PHP provides), or formats
> in a variety of standards.

Hmm... maybe.. I'm hesitant because it feels like feature bloat and might 
add a bit of confusion. OTOH, being able to specify 'when=-20hours' could 
be convenient sometimes. As could some button that allows you to step back 
one 'change', i.e. show the page as it was one change before the current 
revision.

> A question:  what do we do if the requested date is prior to a page's
> available a history (i.e., if the relevant diffs have expired)? 

How about showing a page with a text saying "Sorry, I can't remember that
far back...  click _here_ to see the page as it was on 2003-01-03 21:30".

> What if the expiration dates are different between pages, does the
> "stickiness" of the date change at all?

No.. I think the 'when'-date should stay the same. But I suspect we won't 
know about these kinds of things until we actually start using it... 
but I suspecit something like this would be extremely useful in 
certain contexts.

> > Does this sound like something useful?  Would it be supported by the 
> > current (pmwiki2) implementation of how pages/diffs are stored?
> 
> Sure, technically it's fairly easy to achieve, although there are going
> to be a few quirks here and there.  For example, we won't have a way to
> view deleted pages, and links to pages that didn't exist in the past
> would show up as existing (although following the page link would 
> display "Describe {$FullName} here" for the target page's text).
> 
> And no, I don't have any present plans to make PmWiki into a full-fledged
> version control system (i.e., being able to recover deleted pages).

That's ok I think, at least for how I'd be using the system.

Oops.. I just realized that spam could be a problem here, so we'd need a 
'ignore' thingy in the robots.txt for pages like this (or the equivlaent, 
I'm to tired now).

cheers
/Christian


-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr