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

chr@home.se chr
Thu Jun 17 04:02:17 CDT 2004


On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 10:01:39PM +0200, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> >   
> > > The question (I think) you are really asking is why not give pages
> > > a unique ID other than the page name,
> > 
> > No, I mean in *addition* to their page name. It should be as simple as 
> > adding a field: "ID=2323" where the number is increased each time a new 
> > page is created.
> 
> I have no problem with adding a new field of this sort to the existing
> page files.

Great, that's really all I'm asking for at the moment. (Well, and that 
the ID is increased each time a new page is created, which requires an 
additional file to keep track of the ID of the last created page)

>  But I don't quite see what value this brings, or how 
> this makes it easier to do any of the things I think you're talking
> about doing (you'll have to walk me through this, I'm afraid).

I hope it can wait, since I'd like to finish my promised analysis of link 
syntax fist.

> When I think of having unique page IDs in the sense of a serial number,
> like this case, I tend to think that the serial number would
> become the name of the file that is used to store/locate the page and 
> that there has to be a separate PageName->ID mapping maintained somewhere.

I can see why you'd think that, but I (like you) think it's much more 
convenient if the names of the files correspond to their URI.

> > I just realized that with an extension, version control of page names
> > would let you deal with renamed pages (that don't have a redirect).
> > Would that be useful?
> 
> Not really; the existing redirect mechanism does pretty much what I want
> it to do--it lets references to the old location correctly point to
> the new location and notifies people of the change.

Um.. I'm not really talking about the case where you've placed the
[[redirect:]] directive in a page, but in the case an administrator
renames a file and forgets to create a new page with the old name that
contains a [[redirect:]]-statement. But I guess you are right - this is a
really special case, and it'd only be useful as automatic redirection
mechanism.

A slight extension of this case is if we have a page 'Main.SomePage' that
has been renamed several times (using 'mv' to e.g.Main.Page1 and
Main.Page2). The user would then like to search for old instances of pages
that were accessed through this URI (one reason coul be that at the moment
there is no 'Main.SomePage'. With old pagenames being stored in the page
files, it's actually possible to scan all pages to see if any of them used
to be called 'Main.SomePage'. So if the user goes to
	www.pmwiki.org/Main/SomePage
and finds that it doesn't exist, he could try and do a search to see if 
it's been renamed, which would result in a list pointing to 'Page1' and 
'Page2'. 

Anyway, these where just loose thoughts, and I guess they're not really 
about ID, but about storing the old page names inside the page file.

> > > Using IDs other than pagenames throws out a lot of tools (ftp, rm, mv,
> > > del, cp, etc.) that are now available for administrative purposes, or at
> > > the least makes them more difficult to use.
> > 
> > * 'rm' will still work (the pages i definitely gone though)
> > * 'mv' will still work (the page has been renamed though)
> > * 'cp' would need extra work aftwards (*)
> 
> I'm missing some pieces here.  If "ID" is just a field
> in the page's file (and the page's name is still the filename), then
> yes, these commands still work.  But in this case I don't see what
> value the "ID" field brings us or how it would be used/useful.  

The ID allows me to create tools that keep track of a specific page,
regardless if it's renamed or not. I want something that I know won't
change over time, whereas the name of the page is something that I
actually may want to change over time.

A cool application would be something that animated how the wiki has
evolved over time. Imagine a graph illustrating all pages, optionally with
links between them, for different times. In order to track pages that have 
been renamed, you could use an ID.

/Christian

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




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