[pmwiki-users] DocumentIndex, wikitrails, premature looping and a suggestion

[Pico]

1. Specific problem: The DocumentIndex wikitrail appears to be broken by 
the loop hack used at the start of the commented links. 

Clicking on the first link (BasicEditing) creates a trail that does 
*not* lead to the second link (CreatingNewPages).  Instead, the 
wikitrail at the first link (BasicEditing) creates a trail that follows 
the commented links the occur after the second instance of 
BasicEditing.  From there, the trail breaks off when pages cease to 
include trailmarkup:

BasicEditing:        << Glossary | Documentation Index | AccessKeys >>
AccessKeys:        << BasicEditing | Documentation Index | BasicVariables >>
BasicVariables:   (No wikitrail)

2. The general behavior: I made a simple test page (Test/WikiTrail) to 
demonstrate and test the underlying behavior, which is:

When the first link is repeated to create a loop before the last links, 
the behavior of the wikitrail at the first page is governed by the 
position of the looping link, rather than the first link, i.e.

WikiTrail1
WikiTrail2
WikiTrail3
WikiTrail1  (the premature loop)
WikiTrail4
WikiTrail5

The index shown above creates the following wikitrail at the pages 
identified

WikiTrail1:    << WikiTrail3 | WikiTrail | WikiTrail4 >>      We would 
want to see << WikiTrail3 | WikiTrail | WikiTrail2 >>
WikiTrail2:    << WikiTrail1 | WikiTrail | WikiTrail3 >>
WikiTrail3:   << WikiTrail2 | WikiTrail | WikiTrail1 >>
WikiTrail4:   << WikiTrail1 | WikiTrail | WikiTrail5 >>
WikiTrail5:   << WikiTrail4 | WikiTrail | >>                        
Trail ends with no loop

3. Comments:  I do not recall (and did not identify) this behavior when 
I tested this back in mid-March (See the last exchanges between Hagan 
and myself on the offlist thread R: FAQs Organization using pagelist, 
dated 3/15/06).  It is possible that this behavior arose with more 
recent versions of PmWiki.

4.  Suggestion: Any thought, or interest, in controlling looping 
behavior through markup?   One approach might be to have the trail look 
for optional anchors that signify a loop back, or just the end, without 
any loop.  It might be interesting if wikitrail markup could choose 
whether to follow these signals, for example, a pagelist using a 
wikitrail, as in the FAQs, could choose to disregard the end or loop 
signals to track the remaining links, while the markup used on the pages 
of the trail could look for, and honor, the end and loop signals.  
(Another, less interesting approach, might be to allow the trail markup 
inserted in individual pages to be modified, to loop back to the 
starting page).

Pico