[pmwiki-users] Re: Reason why pagetoc.php isn't used for Cookbook.Cookbook?

[Joachim Durchholz]

John Rankin wrote:
> On Tuesday, 21 June 2005 10:52 AM, chr at home.se wrote:
> 
> I agree with Patrick that enabling a particular recipe group-wide or
> site-wide is potentially a problem. Visitors will reasonably expect 
> a feature they see in action to work when they download and install
> pmwiki itself.

I think I disagree with that reasoning.

People are aware that pmwiki.org is different from local wikis. They 
know they can have all kinds of recipes, and - more visibly - they can 
install a different skin. Not having a given functionality is (from a 
non-programmer's perspective) just the same.

I see a different problem though: recipes that aren't installed will 
make the wiki page look ugly since all the markup isn't available. I.e. 
assuming there's a (:pdf...:) markup that typesets the page on PDF, the 
wiki admin will just see those (:pdf...:) markups.
What PmWiki *should* do in such a case is any of the following (in 
ascending order of preference for me):

* Ignore the markup (i.e. display nothing)
* Output a message saying "if PDF recipe were installed, this would be a 
link to the PDF version of this page".

I'm not sure that the second variant is feasible, but he first certainly 
is: just add a markup that recognises all remaining instances of (:...:) 
and replaces it with an empty string.
I'm not sure how to extend that to (:foo:)...(:fooend:) markup. Not 
because it would be difficult to recognise that (that's not too 
difficult), but because I don't know what to do with the intervening 
wikitext: keep it or drop it?

Regards,
Jo