[Pmwiki-users] Main URI for pmwiki.org

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 03:29:35PM +0200, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> At the moment, a URI such as 
> 	http://www.pmwiki.org/PmWiki/PmWiki
> doesn't work. This is annoying when you go to the main page by entering:
> 	http://www.pmwiki.org/
> because then you can't simply append 'Group/PageName' to the URI in order
> to go to a specific page. 
> [...]
> You probably know that I'd prefer being able to use URIs such as
> http://www.pmwiki.org/PmWiki/PmWiki, but if you don't want that, maybe you
> could let the URI http://www.pmwiki.org automatically be redirected to
> http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/

It's not that I don't want to use URLs such as 
http://www.pmwiki.org/PmWiki/PmWiki -- actually I would prefer to use
them.  But, there are some support and marketing issues involved that I
haven't been able to satisfactorily resolve...

First, marketing.  Because of the way current search engine technologies
(e.g., Google) work, I think it's important that every page on the
pmwiki.org site have a single, unique URL.  If a page is referenced and 
addressed by multiple different URLs, then the page's value may become 
"diluted" in searches and end up with a lower search ranking.  This is
why, for example, requests to http://www.pmichaud.com/wiki/PmWiki/SomePage
are now automatically redirected to pmwiki.org.

So, one would say "okay, just use http://www.pmwiki.org/PmWiki/PmWiki" as
the official page name.  But, pmwiki.org is really an advertisement for
PmWiki, and to a large extent I think it sets people initial expectations
for the product.  To me, initial impressions of a product, especially
during installation, are very important and have a huge impact in how
likely the product is to be developed.

Thus, if pmwiki.org has URLs like http://www.pmwiki.org/PmWiki/PmWiki, 
then I think people will often expect to get the same (or be able to 
get the same) when they install PmWiki.  But, when they install PmWiki, 
they get a URL that initially looks much different (worse).  If pmwiki.org
has URLs of the form "/wiki/PmWiki/PmWiki", a fair number of installers 
will at least be able to imagine ways in which they can configure their 
system to work like what they've seen on pmwiki.org, so there's hope.  
But as far as I know, the *only* way to get URLs like "/PmWiki/PmWiki" 
to work is to use Apache and mod_rewrite, which cuts out a good number
of installation environments.

>From a software adoption perspective, I much prefer to give people a 
moderate initial expectation, and then exceed it, than to provide a 
high expectation and fail to live up to it.  As it is, I already get 
a fair number of disappointed users who have to use "?pagename=" URIs
because their PHP environment won't support PATH_INFO strings.

It also becomes a support issue, as the number of requests for help
in "how do I make my URLs look like pmwiki.org" goes up.  In theory
this should be resolvable by having sufficient documentation on the
site; so far we aren't there yet.

As I said, I haven't completely resolved the above in my own mind,
so I'm very open for suggestions and other approaches.  In the meantime, 
I'll see about setting up pmwiki.org with RedirectMatch directives 
so that "http://www.pmwiki.org/Group/SomePage" will at least redirect 
to "http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Group/SomePage".  

Pm