[Pmwiki-users] InterMap definitions

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Dawn Green wrote:

> A lot here ...
> 
> > sense to move intermap.txt, localmap.txt, and local.php to be somewhere
> > else other than the pmwiki/ root, but I haven't figured out where yet.
> 
> Okay, now here again from the novice with little experience, but honestly, I
> didn't and still don't understand why group specific 'stuff' is going into
> local/ yet localmap.txt and local.php went into the root directory of PmWiki. 

...because I hadn't come up with the idea of a "local/" directory when I first
created PmWiki, and I didn't want to break the existing installations that
expect local.php to be in the pmwiki/ directory.  It's really that simple.  :-)

For a historical perspective, the intermap.txt/localmap.txt feature was
added in December 2001 (prior to pmwiki-0.1 release).  WikiGroups and the
scripts/ subdirectory weren't added until pmwiki-0.2 in February 2002.
I didn't think of creating a local/ directory for group scripts until much 
later--around the time I started pmichaud.com (July 2002).  And I haven't
moved local.php and localmap.txt into local/ because it'll break existing
PmWiki installations and their current location hasn't bugged me enough
to do anything about it yet.

> > If someone wants to propose a new subdirectory structure for housing
> > the various pmwiki-related files, I'm open for suggestions.  Propose
> > what would be best w/o worrying about backwards compatibility.  I'm a
> > bit concerned that I may soon reach a point where I have to decide 
> > between backwards compatibility and an important PmWiki improvement, 
> 
> Eek!  Do it now, before you have too many users!

Alas, I'm not that clairvoyant.  At present I just have a nagging feeling
that I might need/want to do something not-very-backwards-compatible in the
near future, but I don't yet know what it is or what might break
as a result.  If I did know, I'd definitely make the changes sooner rather
than later.  I guess I'm just saying that if people have 'radical' proposals
for change, now's a good time to be making them.  

> I have not used trails and would love to see some documentation on how to
> integrate them.  Does it exist?

Try http://www.pmichaud.com/wiki/Experimental/WikiTrail.  Also, you can
look at the comments of the trails.php code for some more details.  I'm
not sure where the script documentation should generally go in the PmWiki 
scheme of things--I'd like to have the documentation as WikiPages, but
then there's the problem of documenting features that a wiki administrator
might not have enabled...

Pm