[pmwiki-users] Oh so close...

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Sun, Aug 13, 2006 at 04:05:03PM -0500, George wrote:
> The big issue I had before was having to manually maintain indices for 
> WikiTrails and other index pages. The fact was I had literally hundreds 
> of pages, split across multiple groups, with WikiTrails for each group 
> (in a couple of cases, I had multiple WikiTrails in use for different 
> "sub" groups).  And, then, for some pages, I would have to manually edit 
> the page to (:include :) new pages when I added a new page to the group.
> 
> Now, it appears that (:pagelist :) can generate the output I want, and 
> even format in whatever manner I want it formatted through custom 
> formatting.  This completely removes the need for using (:include :)! 
> (YAY!!!)  However, what it doesn't do, is give me an automatic way to 
> generate the index for a WikiTrail.
 
> But, I am thinking there must be a way to do this now.  (:pagelist :) is 
> powerful enough to generate the output that is needed.  What is needed 
> is just a mechanism that could save the output from (:pagelist :) to the 
> WikiTrail index (ie, replace the old contents of the WikiTrail index 
> page) whenever a page is updated or created.

Have you considered dynamic group trails?
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/DynamicTrails
 
I think this may do (most of) what you need.  Certainly it enables you
to automatically make a wiki-trail out of all the pages in a group, and
an automatic index of all pages in that group.  The limitations of it
are that 
(a) the group homepage must be used as the index page for the wikitrail
(b) it can only list pages which can be defined in a pagelist (e.g. all
    the pages in a group, pages whose names match a certain pattern, etc.)
(c) the ordering of the pages in the trail is limited to the ordering
    that one can get in a pagelist (default is page name, though title
    is another useful option)

If you want to have more control over what is on a particular wiki
trail, and want the same page to appear on more than one wiki trail, you
could go for the opposite approach, given as an example in the
PageListExtensions cookbook.
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/PageListExtensions

I used this for my book-reviews pages
http://www.katspace.org/reviews/Books/

This approach is to make the wiki-trail indexes by hand, but to generate
the wiki-trail markup automatically (in the GroupHeader or GroupFooter)
to display wiki-trail markup for every wiki-trail the current page is
part of.

But from what you were saying, it sounds as if the first approach would
be more helpful to you.

Kathryn Andersen
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