[pmwiki-users] Utility pages
Patrick R. Michaud
pmichaud at pobox.com
Tue Jun 14 21:45:51 CDT 2005
With this message I'll try to review the options discussed thus far,
offer some opinions, and then let's see if we can come to a decision
that most of us can live with.
Background: PmWiki comes distributed with a number of default pages
that--for a variety of reasons--likely don't belong in the PmWiki group.
Traditionally these "utility" pages have been placed in the "Main" group:
Main.AllRecentChanges
Main.AllRecentUploads (not currently used in 2.0)
Main.SearchWiki
Main.PageNotFound
Main.SideBar
Main.ApprovedUrls
Main.Blocklist
Other utility pages have appeared in the PmWiki group, but perhaps
do not belong there:
PmWiki.EditQuickReference
PmWiki.UploadQuickReference
PmWiki.WikiHelp (never been terribly useful)
We've also discussed the possibility that the edit form, and possibly
other pages, would themselves be configured using wiki pages:
????.EditForm (proposed, see Test.EditForm on pmwiki.org)
In addition, we've discussed having a standard page in the
distribution that would contain a list of available actions --
so far we've talked about placing such as page in a group
called "PmWikiAdmin":
PmWikiAdmin.ActionList (proposed)
Finally, when PmWiki is first installed the site is given a
default starting page, called "Main.HomePage". The starting
location for pages is configured via the $DefaultGroup, $DefaultName,
and $DefaultPage variables.
Main.HomePage
Main.WikiSandbox
There are basically three issues we have to resolve:
1. Where should the "utility" pages go (i.e., what should this
utility group be called)?
2. What variable should we use to configure the location of the
utility pages?
3. How do we migrate to choices #1 and #2 without drastically
breaking things in the process?
I think we should resolve the questions in the order given above -- i.e.,
I'm more interested in getting the location of the pages right than worrying
about what the configuration variable will be called. So, let's look at
possible names for the utility pages, and my comments for each
Main
What we've been using, and it doesn't seem to work. Next candidate.
PmWikiAdmin, PmWikiSupport
Thus far, the most popular choices. But they're a bit long --
I'd get annoyed seeing PmWikiAdmin.AllRecentChanges all the time.
Site
Actually, this one is growing on me the more I think about it --
Site.AllRecentChanges, Site.SearchWiki, Site.EditForm, Site.ActionList,
Site.EditQuickReference, etc. all seem to work very well. The downside
is that it encroaches on sites that want to use "Site" as a group--
but I suspect that's not common (and the few sites that want to do
this can move the default Site.* pages to another group).
Admin
I know too many sites that may want to use the group name "Admin"
for something other than PmWiki administration. Next.
PmWikiSettings, Config
The problem I have with names like "settings" or "config" is that
many of the utility pages (AllRecentChanges, EditQuickReference,
SearchWiki) aren't really "configuration" -- there seems to be
a mismatch there.
Utility, Util, UtilGroup
These aren't too bad, except that it removes "Utility" as a possible
group name for a site to use. Plus it seems long to type.
Common, CommonGroup
Shared, SharedGroup
Not bad, but somehow I think someone might be confused into thinking
that the pages that appear in this group are somehow forwarded to
every group, or are somehow "global".
Meta, MetaGroup
For many of us, the name "MetaGroup" conjures up images of an
organization infamous for having produced some biased technology
studies about Windows vs. Linux servers... ick.
Aux, AuxGroup, Etc, ETC
These aren't too bad, they're nice and short and aren't likely
to interfere with other desirable group names. But they're not
all that obvious, either...
Farm, Field
These have possibilities, especially where wikifarms are concerned,
but may be confusing for people who aren't running wikifarms.
Of the above, my favorite is now "Site". It's short, and reasonably
descriptive of its contents. My previous objection to the
"Site" proposal was that I didn't like "Site.HomePage" as the default
starting page, but since we're now likely to be making a distinction
between the "home" group and the "utility pages" group we can leave
the default starting point as "Main.HomePage" without any difficulty.
If we go with "Site", I think the obvious configuration variable name
for it is $SiteGroup.
Comments, reactions?
If we get reasonable agreement about the group name, we then have to
figure out a migration strategy to get to the new framework without
totally destroying existing sites. But let's see how much agreement
we have on the naming issues first...
Pm
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