[pmwiki-users] How use lowercase in Group Names

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:35:03AM -0600, Spare Room wrote:
>    Curently I can create groupnames only with first letter capitalized.
>    ie: sitename.com/Whatever/PageName. 
>    Can I also make groupnames in lower case?
>    sitename.com/whatever/PageName

This can be done, but it requires changing quite a few configuration
variable settings.

>    Or.....is there a way so that if a user types it in lowercase, it doesn't
>    throw an error but finds the capitalized version?

Well, on servers that have case-insensitive filenames (e.g., Windows),
PmWiki already understands lowercase pagenames.

On Unix-based servers PmWiki can already understand urls that
don't begin with a capital letter -- for example, see
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/test/homePage .  Note that this isn't
true case-insensitivity for the entire name -- the "P" would still
have to be capitalized.  

Getting true case-insensitivity on case-sensitive filesystems might
require a fair bit of work or slow down the overall system a bit,
especially when doing backlinks, categories, or searches.

Although, come to think of it, for this we don't need case insensitivity
throughout the system -- only at the point where we're processing
url information.  We might be able to come up with a reasonably
fast method for converting a case-insensitive url into a case-sensitive
pagename.

One last point -- your specific question was:

>    Can I also make groupnames in lower case?
>    sitename.com/whatever/PageName

I'm assuming from this that you're using CleanURLs of some form --
note that several of the CleanURL approaches rely on the fact that
the first character of the group is uppercase.  In particular,
there has to be a way to preserve access to the pub/ and uploads/
directories; if http://sitename.com/whatever/PageName needs to
download a .css file from http://sitename.com/pub/skins/pmwiki/pmwiki.css,
then the webserver will need some way of knowing that the "pub/"
here refers to a normal directory and not a PmWiki group.

Pm