[pmwiki-users] 404 Not Found

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 04:35:10PM -0700, H. Fox wrote:
> [...continued]
> 
> So now what's left is to determine what to present to *authors* when
> they arrive at a 404 page...
> 
> That seems to depend on whether Link is qualified or not.  Again, by
> qualified I mean whether a GroupName is requested or not
> (?n=SomeGroup.MissingPage vs. ?n=Something).
> 
> For qualified links there should be an easy way to create the page if
> that's what the author would like to do, and not much more than that. 
> Something like this would be great:
> 
>    MissingPage doesn't exist.  [Create it]
>
> Where "Create it" is in a button.  Clicking the button invokes
> ?action=edit for the page.

As a result, for qualified links the same PageNotFound page can
serve for both authors and visitors:

    {$Name} doesn't exist.
    (:if auth edit:) [ [[{$FullName}?action=edit | Create it]] ] (:if:)

> The sticky situation is what to do when the missing page isn't
> qualified (an incomplete name).  If the incomplete name match a
> group's home page the author is take there.  When the incomplete name
> doesn't match any group' s home page it means one of two things.
> 
> 1) The group exists, but has no home page.
> 2) The group doesn't exist.
> 
> This is where it's a bit harder to predict intentions.

It's also a little harder to figure out if the group exists,
as it requires scanning the page directories to see if there
are any pages in the group.

But I'm starting to come to the conclusion that we should just
assume that all incomplete names are intended to refer to a group,
and then we treat it with a PageNotFound message for the group's
home page (either Group.Group or Group.{$DefaultPage}, but not both).  
So, for ?n=Something, we get

    Something doesn't exist.  

along with a [[Create it]] link if the visitor has sufficient
edit privileges.

Pm