[pmwiki-users] pmwiki-2.1.beta37 released (some important changes, feature freeze)

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Mar 8 21:39:17 CST 2006


I've just released pmwiki-2.1.beta37, and it contains a few changes
that warrant special attention.  As always, the new release is 
available from:

    http://www.pmwiki.org/pub/pmwiki/pmwiki-2.1.beta37.tgz
    http://www.pmwiki.org/pub/pmwiki/pmwiki-2.1.beta37.zip
    svn://pmwiki.org/pmwiki/tags/latest

The major visible change in this release is to the (:redirect:)
markup, but there are also some minor "behind-the-scenes" changes
to eventually support server-side page caching and saved page
properties.


Changes to (:redirect:) markup
------------------------------
This release changes the implementation of the (:redirect:) markup
to be more consistent with the handling of other markups.
It also adds a number of new features.  The vast majority of sites 
will not see any impact from the changes, but a few sites that 
may have been relying on certain features of the previous 
implementation could be affected.  Here's how the new redirect works:

 - redirects can be placed inside of conditional markup (:if:)
   and included pages (:include:), and can include page variable
   substitutions

 - Redirects can now include anchors in the target, as in  
      (:redirect PageName#anchor:)

 - A redirect to a non-existent page is always ignored and displayed
   in the page output.

 - A redirect to the current page is always suppressed and not displayed.

 - As before, redirects do not "chain", thus if A redirects to B,
   and B redirects to C, then a person viewing page A will only be 
   redirected to B and not to C.  

 - A from= option filters the redirect option, thus

       (:redirect from=PmWiki.* to=Main.WikiSandbox:)

   will redirect to Main.WikiSandbox only if we're currently on a
   page in the PmWiki group.

 - The status= option can be used to change the HTTP response status
   code to 301, 302, 303, or 307:

       (:redirect Group.OtherPage status=301:)
       Permanently redirected to Group.OtherPage

If any of these changes to (:redirect:) cause problems for existing
sites, contact me and I'll come up with an appropriate workaround
or fix.


Server-side page caching
------------------------
This release also includes an experimental server-side page caching
feature.  This feature is completely disabled by default, so it shouldn't
affect any upgrading sites, and it's "experimental", which means I'm not
guaranteeing that it'll work or remain in the distribution.  
Frankly, I'm adding it because the demand on pmwiki.org's servers
has become so high lately (a good thing overall) that I felt I'd
better find some way to reduce the load.

Since it's currently an experimental/unsupported feature I'm not 
going to describe it much more in this announcement; I just wanted
to mention its presence in case people noticed it in the code
and wanted to know what it was about, or in case by some off-chance
it does end up interfering with existing configurations even though
it's disabled.


No more major changes before 2.1.0
----------------------------------
With this release, I'm declaring a "feature freeze" in the 2.1.beta
series.  The next few releases will be "documentation releases" as
we fix up the documentation, and then the official 2.1.0 release
will be out this weekend.  More details about the timing of the 
2.1.0 release and the documentation work will be in a message 
to be sent later tonight.

Thanks,

Pm




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