[pmwiki-users] Re: Idea: Opera-like address field on the wiki page

[chr at home.se]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 05:24:45PM -0500, Neil Herber wrote:
> > At 2005-02-02  11:00 PM +0100, chr at home.se is rumored to have said:
> > >Does this make sense? Is it too advanced for normal users?
> > 
> > Somewhat and yes.
> > [...]
> > I would strongly advise against changing the way search works on PmWiki.
> 
> More to the point, such things can be easily done in cookbook recipes
> and don't have to be built-in to PmWiki.  Indeed, the entire search
> code is just a pluggable script.

Oh, I do mean for this to be a cookbook. I'm mainly looking for thoughts 
on what extra functionality that'd be useful to have for a more general 
purpose text form.

> Most people expect the default to be a search, so requiring a special
> character to indicate "search" is probably wrong.

I agree (especially if the field is called "Search..." :-)

> It's probably okay to introduce a heuristic that if the text entered is
> a link to an existing page, then simply jump to that page instead of
> performing the search.  However, I'd still leave this as a cookbook
> recipe and not defaulted into PmWiki itself.

Right now I was primarily thinking of using a single character at the 
beginning of the form to indicate that it's used for something other than 
a plain text search.

Here's a list of some functionality I could think of:

* (default) Search for pages containing all words in the form
* Search using logical operators (AND, OR etc)
* Case sensitive search
* Search for pages using a regexp taken from the form
* Go to a wiki page with the name taken from the form
* List pages in a group whose name is taken from the form

Using a single letter, the functionality could be assigned as follows:

  (no letter) or 's'	Normal search, case insensitive
  'a'			Advanced search using operators
  'c'			Case sensitive search
  'r'			Regexp search
  'g'			Go to wiki page
  'l'			List pages in a group

However, i expect that administrators would wish to customize exactly what 
happens when using different first letters.

Right now this is just on the stage where I'd like to discuss the idea, I 
expect I won't have time to implement something like this now anyway. But 
it'd be nice to get some feeling for what kind of operations should be 
desired. And also if maybe the interface should be completely different? 
Instead of letters, you could for instance imagine having several buttons 
next to the text field, one for each kind of action.

/Christian

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