[pmwiki-users] Cross-group wiki trails

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, Mar 27, 2005 at 02:26:17PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> >On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 11:57:06AM +0100, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> >
> >>I have been unable to produce an example from scratch. However, one of 
> >>the three wikis I'm administering indeed exhibits the problem. 
> >
> >Yes, it's a bug.  I'm working on it now.
> 
> Is it already fixed in beta27?

No, it's a significant bug without an easy fix.  It may be a while.

> >(The ability to create rings
> >is by design.)
> 
> Hmm... I understand that having a ring is a Good Thing, but this 
> particular way of specifying ring-ness doesn't feel right to me.
> I might want to have the trail just in a single place on the page, and 
> make it a ring. 

The thing that makes a trail into a ring is having a single page listed
twice in the trail -- not that the trail itself duplicated on the
page.  Thus:

    * PageThree
    * PageFour
    * PageFive
    * PageThree

defines a ring.  An author can even define a ring in the middle of a
trail:

    * PageOne
    * PageTwo
    * PageThree
    * PageFour
    * PageFive
    * PageThree

> Or, conversely, I might want to have it in two places 
> (at the top and at the bottom), and as a linear sequence.

Which, you obviously want.  :-)  I don't have an easy way to do this
without introducing lots more markup or using (:include:).

> There's one other thing: I'd like to have a way to include the trail 
> index page in the trail itself. I know that this can already can be done 
> by including a self-referential link in the bullet list, but it's quite 
> dumb if a page says "List of Features", and the very first entry on it 
> says "* [[List of Features]]". It would look stupid, and I don't like 
> writing pages that look stupid ;-)

This is a fairly rare request, but 

    * [[List of Features]] %item display=none%
    * [[Another list]] %item comment%

work just fine -- these place the pages in the trail but don't display
them on output.

> Maybe a trail index page should (optionally) include a directive to 
> control the appearance and general gestalt of trail markups. Something like
>   (:trail <options>:)
> where each <option> could set up the trail sequence (and, maybe, set 
> other things as well). 

Maybe, but given that I'm a fan of simple implementations, it's not
likely to happen soon.  I like that a trail is just a simple list of
pages without having to load lots of other semantics or interpretations
on top of it.  But, trails are already being discussed at 
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/00398 -- you might add this comment
there.

Just to let people know what's coming, I am planning to implement 
the <<|?TrailPage|>> and <<|?[[trail page]]|>> markups relatively soon.
Trails based on a categories may take slightly longer, if only because
in order for a trail to work there has to be *some* ordering of the
pages and categories don't define any ordering (yet?).

And I'll also note that trails are implemented as a separate module
(scripts/trails.php, controlled by $EnableWikiTrails), so it's entirely
possible to create a replacement trails module that does what others
want. :-)

Pm