[pmwiki-users] Handling of PageNotFound situations

[H. Fox]

On 1/11/06, Fick, Martin <fick at fgm.com> wrote:
>
>   Well, this will not really help for misspellers,
>  they will still click on the link won't they?

I forgot about categories not having question marks when the page doesn't exist.

I'll revise and elaborate...

When an author creates a link to new category, give the link a question mark.

Clicking the link will create a page from a template.  To reduce
confusion, the template would have an explanatory comment using
(:comment:) or (:if false:) markup.

With this in place, when a category already exists they'll see the ' ?
' and have an opportunity correct the spelling.

Taking this a bit further, for the sake of author-friendliness...

Ship PmWiki with a Category.GroupFooter page that contains markup like

    (:pagelist '!{$Namespaced}' list=normal fmt=simple:)

and use something like this for the template

    (:comment  This is a category page.  Use "Preview" :)
    (:comment  to see the full output, including       :)
    (:comment  GroupHeader and GroupFooter content.    :)
    $[Pages in this category:]

(Of course the usual first-draft disclaimers apply.)

End Result:
An author can create a new category by only creating a [[!category
link]] and visiting it once.  When they do that, the default output
for the category page will be

    Pages in this category:
        * SomeGroup.SomePage

Hagan

>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: pmwiki-users-bounces at pmichaud.com on behalf of H.
> Fox
>  Sent: Wed 1/11/2006 9:46 PM
>  To: Hans
>  Cc: Pmwiki-users at pmichaud.com
>  Subject: Re: [pmwiki-users] Handling of PageNotFound situations
>
>  On 1/10/06, Hans <design at softflow.co.uk> wrote:
>  > 1. Creating a new category page by creating a link alone. Clicking the
>  > ne wcategory link will take you to the newly created and saved
>  > category page, saving the step of having to save it.
>
>  I like this idea, except the category page should be created on the
>  first visit, not by the mere act of creating a  link.
>
>  At minimum there should be some kind of limit to the number of new
>  blank pages that can be created by saving a page with links to
>  non-existent category pages.  Otherwise pasting in 200 category links
>  creates 200 pages...
>
>  Requiring an author to click the link doesn't seem like too much to
>  ask, especially in an open-wiki environment.  Save the page => See the
>  ' ? ' => Click... Done.
>
>  Remember too, some people are [[!mispellers]].  :-)
>
>  Hagan