[pmwiki-users] PageName without Group in the URL and other URL generating issues

[Waylan Limberg]

I recently started playing with PMWiki and have managed to figure out
quite a few little hacks so that URLs are the way I want them rather
than default behaviour. However, there are a few problems I haven't
solved. I don't care for the way that PMWiki generates URLs to pages.
Let me expound.

As I currently understand it, a page must always be called by
Group/PageName. So if you have a page for each of your products they
would be (assuming pmwiki.php is in the server root):
http://example.com/products/widget
http://example.com/products/gizmo

That behavior is fine (mostly - see last gripe). What about the main
products page where all the products are listed? Currently we could do
something like the following:
http://example.com/products/all

While that works, I would prefer:
http://example.com/products

That way the URLs match the layout of the nested list for the menu and
makes more sense IMHO. Perhaps, if there was a way to define a default
page for a group. Assuming the default page is 'products/all' a call
to http://example.com/products/ would display 'products/all' without
indicating any difference to the user.

Additionally, if there is a single page, like, say, the 'About' page, doesn't
http://example.com/about
make more sense than:
http://example.com/site/about

In that case, perhaps if there was a way to define a default group
(like site), but not have it displayed in the URL (as happens
currently). Rather, could PMWiki, upon receiving a request with only
one parameter, then redirect to the default group? In other words,
assuming 'site' is the default group, any request for
http://example.com/PageName will actually look for site/PageName
without ever indicating as much to the user.

Obviously, if both the above suggestions were implemented together, I
could not have a PageName for site/PageName that was the same as a
Group, or if I did I would need a way to define which takes
precedence.

Oh, and one other thing. As you may have noted, none of the above
example have any capital letters (except where the Group and PageName
variable are used). I generally insist that all URLs be all lowercase
only. Is there a way to disable the first character of each Group and
PageName from being capitalized in the URLs. (I have already set
$LinkWikiWords = 0; but that has no effect on this issue)

I realize that I could define some custom rewrite rules with
Mod_Rewrite to address some of the issues, but I want the links
generated by PMWiki to be altered. I don't want to have define
absolute links throughout the site and then edit the rewrite rules
every time a page is added/renamed/deleted.

Thanks for any help you can provide.
-- 
----
Waylan Limberg
waylan at gmail.com