[pmwiki-devel] MakeLink and Automatic category pages

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 12:03:06AM -0400, DaveG wrote:
> I have two questions:
> *2] Automatic page creation*
> The pages I'll be referring to don't exist -- I'm using a GroupFooter. 
> The link format in the MakeLink above (parameter 5) works to remove the 
> '?action=edit', but I still get the text in the page:
> "The page "MyCategory.PageName" doesn't exist. ....."
> 
> I've tried using:
> $AutoCreate['/^Unphotographed\./'] = array('ctime' => $Now, 'text' => 
> 'test');
> 
> But nothing changes, and pages are not created when I visit them. I 
> still get the same message "...doesn't exist..." message. I'd like to 
> either remove the message for all pages in a specific group, or 
> auto-create the  pages.


$AutoCreate only creates pages if a page is saved that has a link to the
specified group/pagename.  In other words, the setting above says
that if a page is saved that contains a link to a page in the Unphotographed
group, automatically create that target page at the same time.
Note that auto-creation only occurs when a page is being saved,
not when a link is displayed (so links in a GroupFooter only auto-create
pages at the time when the GroupFooter is saved).

There are a number of ways to get empty pages to change the default
displayed text, most are controlled by the $DefaultPageTextFmt variable
For example, you can set

    $DefaultPageTextFmt = 
      '(:include {$Group}.PageNotFound {$SiteGroup}.PageNotFound:)';

which causes a non-existent page to display 'PageNotFound' from the
current group if it exists, and use Site.PageNotFound otherwise.
Thus you could create Unphotographed.PageNotFound and that text
would be used for any non-existent pages in the Unphotographed group.

You can also have a per-group customization file that sets the
value of $DefaultPageTextFmt .

As far as making it appear that pages in the Unphotographed group
always exist (even when they don't), several possibilities have been
discussed but I haven't been comfortable with any of them to adopt
them directly.

Pm