[Pmwiki-users] Idea: page fallbacks

[John Rankin]

On Friday, 16 May 2003 4:09 AM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> =
wrote:
On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 10:41:39AM -0300, Fabio Reis Cecin wrote:
>=20
> Hi. I was wondering.. anybody would need something like a "page
> fallback" mechanism? I'll explain:
>=20
> 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?
>=20
> 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.

...

But "fallback groups" might be an interesting alternative.  Rather than
try to create a mechanism whereby some pages can automatically appear in=20
every group (which gets really ugly), simply allowing unqualified page=20
references to look in a list of "fallback" groups might work. =20

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

--
Another option would be to allow pages to have 'versions'. Here is how =
this might work, in a way that could be done as a local customisation.

Consider a page called CourseX and you want to have multiple versions. The =
general markup would be CourseX~VersionN (the ~ character is for =
illustration). On the CourseX page, an author would write:

CourseX versions:
* ~Version1
* ~Version2
* ~Version3

and so on.=20

PmWiki would interpret ~VersionN as a reference to a page called CourseX~=
VersionN. On some other page, PmWiki would interpret CourseX~ as a =
reference to the last (or first if preferred) entry in a list of the form '=
* ~VersionN' on the CourseX page -- in the example, this would be CourseX~=
Version3.

A reference to CourseX takes you to the CourseX page; a reference to =
CourseX~VersionN takes you to that page.

I think this would 'just work' -- add a new entry to the CourseX list for =
a new version and all references to CourseX~ automatically take you to the =
new page. It would also be easy to revert to a previous version by moving =
it to the end (or start) of the list.

As an aside, an administrator could, now that I think about it, also use =
this to implement 'redirect' markup for any wiki page...


John Rankin