[pmwiki-users] Newbie Alert!!! - Simple Database?

Hans design5 at softflow.co.uk
Mon Oct 29 04:23:17 CDT 2007


Saturday, October 27, 2007, 12:54:45 PM, Jeff Schallenberg wrote:

> I have read a bit about Forms in PmWiki, but I have not seen any
> examples or recipes that are like what I would call a database.

> Do you have any suggestions how to proceed, or any example wikis with
> something like a database? A simple contact list or even a todo list
> would be useful for me to study.

Obviously PmWiki stores all pages as separate page files, so it is not
using a database. But you could store your date on separate pages, one
page for each record, in a group designed for it, or in several
groups. Data entries from form input fields can be posted as page text
variables into a newly created data page. Data can then be retrieved
with the help of pagelists.

Fox http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Fox can do all this, in
combination with the (:input ...:) markup.
Examples are here:
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/FoxContacts (there is also a link
to a live example on my site).
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/FoxSimpleTodoList ( I have not
checked this).
FoxForum with its ForumX templates is doing something similar: storing
each forum message on a separate page. The display is handled with
separate display templates, so data content (messages in this case) and
display are separated.
FoxBlog does it similar, and using various pagelists to display lists
of entries, comments, and blog lists.

It is a very flexible system for posting content from input fields.
Input can be processed before it gets posted. Including delete links
in the posting form template makes it easy to delete entries later.
Security can be set up very flexible as well, with the need to set
up pages or groups with explicit posting permissions.

The general problem with using pagelists to retrieve data from lots of
data pages may be that it can be slow, slower than retrieving data
from a database. But it is a wiki, and easy to maintain page files.



  ~Hans




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