[Pmwiki-users] Idea: page fallbacks

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 10:41:39AM -0300, Fabio Reis Cecin wrote:
> 
> 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.).
> ...
> 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" ? :-)

This is an interesting idea--I like the notion of "fallback" groups,
and it might be another way of solving a similar problem I've had on
some of my sites.

When I first implemented the WikiGroup feature, I played a lot with
the idea of having a "wildcard" group--pages in the wildcard group
would magically appear in any group that didn't already have a page
by that name.  This could be really useful for pages such as WikiWikiWeb,
WikiWord, TextFormattingRules, etc. that ought to be shared among the
separate groups.  But after many discussions with a few others I 
ultimately discarded the wildcard group idea because it gets very
confusing to explain and understand which group a page is actually in
and how its references should be handled.

But "fallback groups" might be an interesting alternative.  Rather than
try to create a mechanism whereby some pages can automatically appear in 
every group (which gets really ugly), simply allowing unqualified page 
references to look in a list of "fallback" groups might work.  

I'll have to think about this a bit further--it's definitely worthy of
consideration.  Anyone else have any comments on this idea?

Pm