[pmwiki-users] pagelist sorting question

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 05:40:25PM +0200, Jan Erik Moström wrote:
> I wanted to create a number of pages that contains information 
> about people. My idea was to name the pages like this:
> 
> A page about Donald Duck would get the name "DuckDonald" and 
> then on the page I would you the title tag to generate the title 
> "Donald Duck", this way I could easily get a list sorted after 
> the surname using the pagelist command. But, there is always a 
> but, the people I was thinking of have names like "Åsa 
> Österberg" which becomes a problem if try to save a page named 
> "ÖsterbergÅsa" (I'm running this locally on a Mac, and if I 
> remember thing correctly this a Mac problem).

I don't think it's a problem if you're using utf-8.  But yes,
in general Macs don't seem to support filenames that aren't
utf-8.

> My current "fallback idea" is to let the page name be 
> 'OsterbergAsa' and set the page title be "(:title Österberg, 
> Åsa:)" and let pagelist sort by page title ... this would mean 
> that I lose the first-name-last-name title on the pages (not 
> very important).

How many of these are there?  You might be able to use
custom page variables and/or page text variables to get what
you want.

In the simple case (no non-ASCII chars), you could have a page
named 'DuckDonald' and use a (:title Donald Duck:), as you described
above.

For names with non-ASCII chars, use 'OsterbergAsa' along with
(:title Åsa Österberg:) and (:sortname:ÖsterbergÅsa:) .

Then, create a custom page variable called '$SortName'
that uses $:sortname if it exists and $Name if it doesn't:

    $FmtPV['$SortName'] = '($x=PageTextVar($pn, "sortname")) ? $x : $name';

Your pagelist sort then becomes:

    (:pagelist order=$SortName:)

This will use the value of (:sortname:...:) if it exists, otherwise
it uses the page's name.

Or, you could just give every page *both* a (:title:) and a 
(:sortname:...:), and then you don't need the custom page variable,
and it doesn't matter what a page is named:

    (:pagelist order=$:sortname:)

You might like this better, because then your pages
could be named "DonaldDuck" and "AsaOsterberg" and you'd
still have the capability to sort on last name.

Hope this helps,

Pm