[pmwiki-users] Blog proposal

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 11:20:33AM +0000, Hans wrote:
> What we need is a general method to allow a page to add itself as a
> link in a specified format to a number of trail pages. It should not
> be limited to one blogtrail page. 

I never intended that blog entries could only exist on one trail page.
I've always been of the opinion that pages can exist on multiple
trails.  Even though it wasn't explicitly mentioned in my proposal,
one would be able to do

    (:blog:)
    (:blog OtherPage:)
    (:blog Blog.AllEntries:)

or even

    (:blog {$Group}.BlogTrail,OtherPage,Blog.AllEntries:)

to get a blog onto all pages.  And the admin could set

    $BlogTrailFmt = array('{$Group}.BlogTrail', 'BlogArchive.2005-03', ...);

to have "(:blog:)" automatically populate to several pages.

But the idea of making it easier to create trails has lots of
merit.  But I'm wondering if this means that the generic form of
trails becomes the new way to handle categories as well -- i.e.,
a page with category markup automatically adds itself to the
corresponding category trail.

I'm not a great fan of trying to have trail pages specify their
own format -- that becomes a real pain to manage, especially as
they're being created automatically.  Better is to have the
trail page simply contain a bullet list of pages, and then use
(:pagelist:) to specify alternate formatting options.  

We might also come up with a (:traillist:) version of pagelist
that reads (and removes) a trail from the current page and replaces
it with the formatted version of that trail.  Thus the trail can
continue to be a simple bullet list, but can be formatted on display
using any pagelist format.

> 1. How would it be determined to what auto-trail page a page-link gets
>    added?

I'm thinking it has to be done at the admin level using variables.

> 2. Can a page-link be added to a specific location on the trail page,
>    at a specific marker?

RecentChanges uses two consecutive spaces as the marker for knowing
where to add something to a trail page.  But I think the best
approach is probably to just say that trail entries have to be
unordered lists, and that entries must go either before the first item
or after the last one.

> 3. Can the trail page determine the format of each page-link addition
>    to its growing list?

See above regarding using (:pagelist:) for this.

Pm