[Pmwiki-users] Final hurdles to 2.0

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Tue Oct 19 10:02:06 CDT 2004


Hello, all --

As we get closer to an official release of PmWiki 2.0, there are a
couple of final issues that need to be examined, and if there are
going to be any major changes then now is the time to make them.
I'll frame the issues as succinctly as I can.  

1.  Directive syntax

Many international users have complained that the [:directive:] syntax
is very difficult to type and needs to be replaced.  The latest proposal
to win any support was to switch to using (:directive:) instead, and
discussion yielded only one "sympathy vote" in favor of [:directive:].
So, this is the "final call" for anyone to speak out in favor of [:directive:],
otherwise I'm going to make the switch to (:directive:) and be done
with it.  

(For those who might want to suggest a third alternative--if it appears in
http://www.pmwiki.org/pmwiki2/pmwiki.php/Development/DirectiveMarkup then
it's already been considered, discussed, and rejected by the list, so it 
probably won't be reconsidered.)


2.  $Group / $Name / $PageName template variables

Several have recently commented that $Name causes confusion/ambiguity, so
we need a replacement.  '$Group' doesn't seem to cause much difficulty-- 
it's just too obvious.  That means we need a way to identify a page's
name both by its simple name and by its full path name.

(In an earlier message rday said we just need $Group and $Page and leave
it to the administrator to combine them when necessary, but in looking
at the code and how things are actually used I'm fairly convinced we still
need a separate variable for the page's full name also.)

In my head I'm now framing the question in terms of markup--within a page's
markup, {$Group} is replaced by the page's group, while {$Title} is
replaced by the page's title.  The question then becomes, what markup
would an author wish to use to get the page's name and it's group-qualified
name?  This will then tell us what our variables should be called.  
And I still feel that {$Page} is too ambiguous--it needs to be clearer 
somehow that what the author is getting is the page's un-group-qualified name
and not some other aspect of the page.

Some ideas:  
   group:
      {$Group}, {$PageGroup}, {$GroupName}
   simple name:  
      {$Name}, {$PageName}, {$SimpleName} (too long), {$Page} (too ambiguous),
      {$Topic}, {$Sheet}, {$Leaf}, {$Base}, {$BaseName}
   full group+name:
      {$Path}, {$PagePath}, {$FullPath}, {$FullName}, {$FullPageName},
      {$PageName}
  

Again, we'll be making decisions on these items soon, and once we make
the decision, we're pretty much stuck with them as defaults (local 
customizations will always be able to override the defaults, as usual).

Pm



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