[pmwiki-devel] New Recipe: Content

[Martin Fick]

I would like to announce the new Content recipe:

  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Content

This recipe is an API and is not useful to you unless:  you are a recipe 
developer or you use another recipe which requires this recipe.

This recipe is a building block meant primarily to be used by other recipes, 
recipes which need to create content external to a wiki page but related to 
data in a wiki page.  This related data will either take the form of a 
separate file that can be accessed through a link in the current page or an 
image embedded in the current wiki page. The Content recipe provides a 
mechanism for recipe builders to define content types along with conversion 
mechanisms between these content types (filters/converters). This recipe also 
provides wiki authors with the markup to provide the source data (text) to 
these content types along with the markup to reference this content using a 
simple abstract syntax.

Lastly, this recipe provides many underlying technical mechanisms to help 
recipe builders with common tasks needed to manage dynamic content freeing 
them from much of this burden allowing them to focus on the specific issues 
of their types and converters. These mechanisms include: temporary file 
management for converters, cache management, temporary content preview 
generation, content page splitting (allowing a large file to be split into 
multiple files/links) and content protection (using pmwiki's built in 
authorization scheme for pages).


If this sounds a little vague maybe an example would help.  This new recipe:

  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Music

(announced in the users list) was implemented very easily with this recipe and 
it highlights many of the targeted uses of this new API.

I hope that others can make use of this recipe to create many more recipes 
that create file formats from wiki markup.  I plan on creating a few more 
myself...  If you have an external filter that you want to integrate into 
pmwiki it may well only take two lines of code using this recipe, that is 
what it took for most of the file converters in the music recipe.

As always, feedback appreciated,

-Martin