[pmwiki] Re: [Pmwiki-users] Idea: page fallbacks

[Bernhard.Weichel at t-online.de]

I'am trying to answer the questions from my perspective.

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> Several people have commented about the desirability of a "page
> fallback" feature, but I'm having trouble following the thread or
> knowing where things are at the moment, and following PmWiki
> Philosophy #3 I have a tendency not to implement anything until
> I have a clear idea of exactly what it's supposed to do.
>
> - is it better to have "fallback pages" or "fallback groups"?

PmWiki always displays pages. So it must be "fallback pages"

> - do we have a clear markup syntax?  John Rankin's proposal
>   was using ~ for illustrative purposes--is that the markup we
>   want to use?  What things are allowed to follow the ~?

Do we really need an additional markup syntax? I think we need
an additional filename-convention for which John's proposal (e.g.
Main.Hompage~Version01~en~release sounds pretty good.
In the general case each link should be resolved using the fallback
mechanism such that explicit page selection via markup is the big exception.
But it should be possible to pass a query with a wikiword.
Main/HomePage?lang=de&status=draft

But again, I think no author should select a page directly - otherwise
it would not be a "fallback" mechanism.

Therefore I proposed to use variables which are added to the url
by PmWiki. Such an Url could look like

  Main/HomePage?version=top&lang=de&status=draft
shortcut could be
  Main/HomePage~top~de~draft

the set of selecting properties should be customizable, also the precedence
rules.

PageSelectorDefaults=array('version'=>'top', 'lang'=>'en', 'status' =>
'release')
PageSelectorProperties=array('version', 'lang', 'status);
PageSelectorSequence=array('lang'=>array('en', 'fr', 'de'))

PmWiki tries to identify version, if is not unique, use lang, if it is still
not unique, use status.

Main/HomePage gets the newest released page in english
Main/HomePage?lang=de gets the german version if it is the latest and if it
is release
Main/HomePage

If one of the properties was explicitly passed via URL it is added to any
link
to pmwiki which is called from the current page.

obviously an action is needed to change those properties
if it is not done by a separate maintentance admin script.

> - is there a more descriptive/better term than fallbacks?

'pageselectors'
'

> - are there any other wiki engines that implement a similar concept
>   that we might want to borrow from?

I tried to google but did not find it as a particular feature.
It seems to be there in AXKIT ( apaches XML based application server)
It was desired for rubywiki.

>
> As with most features, if it can be implemented as a separate script
> module outside of pmwiki.php or with minor changes, it can happen
> fairly quickly.

page fallback could provide solutions for

* Page Preview
* Multilingual documents

So I would really appreciate if you could make it.

--b

> Pm
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