finding backlinks (was: [Pmwiki-users] Organization of pages (was: Hierarchical groups))

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 03:37:52PM +0200, Thomas -Balu- Walter wrote:
> 
> While reading this a feature request crawls back into my mind. It would
> be nice to have a "list pages that link to this page" feature or
> similar. By now it's hard, because you can use many different ways to
> link to a page, so a simple search won't return all the pages.

Right now it's a bit difficult to do in 1.0 because there are so many
link syntaxes, and some things that might look like links aren't links.
But in 2.0 it becomes much easier, because the only link syntaxes are
[[...]] and WikiWords.

> I guess this will be a ressource eating beast, but perhaps it could be
> done with a "backlink" index that get's refreshes every X minutes or
> similar.

It actually doesn't eat much more resources than the search engine does.
And my rule of thumb on optimization is to always do the straightforward,
simple implementation first, then optimize when the performance patterns
become clearer.  Creating an index would not be that difficult--indeed,
in v2.0 it will even be possible to add an extension to create and 
maintain a simple index of page cross-references each time a save occurs.

Pm