[Pmwiki-users] child pages v.s. subgroups (Was: ... hierarchical content?)

[chr@home.se]

On Mon, 18 Oct 2004, Stefan Candea wrote:

> For clarity and siplicity sake, and unless we have a better wheel to
> invent, the traditional directory reference (relative or absolute) should
> be applied.

A few notes:
* The basic element of PmWiki is a wiki page -- essentially everything
  that a user sees is a wiki page.
* Not all users know what a directory is these days, but everyone has seen 
  a web page. So let's not assume that the idea of files and directories
  necessarily is easy to understand.
* I think most users "get" the correlation between a page and its URI

I therefore think a case can be made that paths should be derived from the
URI of a wiki page, rather than by introducing directories. The URI is
also something the user can manipulate directly in his browser.

However, the above does not mean that I think groups are bad (in some ways
I even want to be able to let a page belong to several "groups").

Here's an idea:
* First we introduce a mechanism for explicitly defining a group of pages
* Then we introduce a special markup for linking to a page within a group.

For example, this markup
	[[SomeGroup:SomePage]]
would link to the page called 'SomePage' in the group named 'SomeGroup'.

I'm not sure if this really helps us with the syntax problems, but it does
allow us to write links in a more "logical" way. On the other hand, this 
might interfere with PmWiki's inter-links.

Alternatively, we could think of 'SomeGroup' as a search path rather than 
a group. The difference would be that it is no longer a single namespace.

Of course, this might all be way to abstract for normal users.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr