[Pmwiki-users] Idea: page fallbacks

[Fabio Reis Cecin]

Hi. I was wondering.. anybody would need something like a "page 
fallback" mechanism? I'll explain:

A course in subject X has it's page group: "CourseX". But this
course has many editions: 2000-1, 2001-1, 2002-1... And many 
pages don't change at all from one edition to the other (like 
"course description", etc.).

The solution for this "editions" problem is either to create pages
on CourseX that have dates on them, like:
CourseDescription2003s1
StudentList2003s1
Assignment4SolutionByJohnDoe2003s1
etc.

Or, create dated groups (CourseX2003s1, etc.), and then copy all
the pages from the previous edition and modify them to the new
edition, even the unchanged ones.

Maybe a solution would be a "fallback" mechanism of some sort:
you could specify a sequence of groups of pages (somewhere,
maybe in another standard page like GroupAttributes), and
when a page is not found in a group, the wiki would try to find
it in the previous groups in the list, with the same name (in my 
case, the earlier editions of the course).

To prevent fallback from taking place, you could specify the page
explicitly with the dot notation: GroupX2003s1.PageName, letting
the Group/PageName syntax fallback as usual (so when you link
from other groups, you may actually be wanting fallback to take
place).

This is just another idea, don't know if it would be really useful, 
or just be more confusing than helpful?

Or maybe somebody has an idea of how to tackle this "versions" 
problem without all this "page/group name pollution" ? :-)

- Fabio
--
[]'s
F=E1bio R. Cecin
frcecin at terra.com.br