[pmwiki-users] {$UrlPage}

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 11:03:20AM -0700, H. Fox wrote:
> On 10/19/05, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 09:58:09PM -0400, Waylan Limberg wrote:
> > > Absolutely! Say a page is deleted. Someone follows a bookmark to that
> > > now nonexistent page. The wiki just offers to create the page. It
> > > should say the page was deleted (410) or moved to a new location (301)
> > > or some other similar message.
> >
> > Unfortunately there's not a convenient way at the moment for PmWiki
> > to find out that a page is "deleted", it only knows if the page
> > exists or doesn't exist.  PmWiki would need to keep a list of
> > previously existing pages somewhere.  (I suppose we could scan
> > Site.AllRecentChanges or something like that, however.)
> >
> > Yes, we could possibly also scan wiki.d/ looking for the pagename with
> > a ",del-" suffix, but I'm not a big fan of scanning the directory
> > for this.
> 
> Having it be automatic seems bit much.
> 
> Maybe it would be sufficient to have a (:deleted:) directive, so an
> author can signal to a bookmark-follower (or search engine bot) that
> the page is gone for good.

At some point it just becomes easier to configure it in the webserver,
or as part of a configuration file, or even Site.DeletedPages  page.

We can do a (:deleted:) directive, or more generically a (:status 410:)
directive, but the problem is that it messes up things like search
and page links, since PmWiki has to do more than just check for
file existence -- it actually has to read the page file in every
case to know if the page is active or deleted, and that can slow
things down quite a bit.

> PmWiki already has a way of dealing with moved pages (redirecting to
> the new location), right?  Could / should the 301 status code be
> worked into that?

PmWiki already uses a "302 Found" status code in the case of (:redirect:).
I suppose it could be a "301 Moved Permanently" response, but I'm
a little reluctant to assume that such urls are always, automatically,
and irrevocably "permanently moved".

Pm