finding backlinks (was: [Pmwiki-users] Organization of pages (was: Hierarchical groups))

[Thomas -Balu- Walter]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 08:10:25AM -0600, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 03:37:52PM +0200, Thomas -Balu- Walter wrote:
> > 
> > While reading this a feature request crawls back into my mind. It would
> > be nice to have a "list pages that link to this page" feature or
> > similar. By now it's hard, because you can use many different ways to
> > link to a page, so a simple search won't return all the pages.
> 
> Right now it's a bit difficult to do in 1.0 because there are so many
> link syntaxes, and some things that might look like links aren't links.
> But in 2.0 it becomes much easier, because the only link syntaxes are
> [[...]] and WikiWords.

It might become easier, but you still have to watch for 
        [[Linked (Page)]] [[Linked Page | go there]]
so a simple search might not be "enough"

> > I guess this will be a ressource eating beast, but perhaps it could be
> > done with a "backlink" index that get's refreshes every X minutes or
> > similar.
> 
> It actually doesn't eat much more resources than the search engine does.
> And my rule of thumb on optimization is to always do the straightforward,
> simple implementation first, then optimize when the performance patterns
> become clearer.  Creating an index would not be that difficult--indeed,
> in v2.0 it will even be possible to add an extension to create and 
> maintain a simple index of page cross-references each time a save occurs.

BTW - I want to update ;) - at which time do you think it will be
"beta-stable"? (Yes, I know the CVS, but... ;)

-- Balu