[pmwiki-users] pagelists link= with pages generated externally

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Tue May 22 14:05:10 CDT 2007


On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 06:09:17PM +0200, Christophe David wrote:
> >One way that we could improve things here would be to provide
> >an avenue whereby an external application could create a plain
> >text file somewhere, and then issue a command to PmWiki telling
> >it to update the page with the contents of the text file.  
> >[...]
> >Of course, the tricky part in this is managing the files in the
> >directory.  
> 
> This would be extremely useful.
> 
> At first glance, I would suggest
> 
> - to define an "import" directory
> - to create a file .lastimport (like .lastmod)

Oh, .lastimport is an excellent idea.  I should've thought of that.

> - to let Pmwiki check every time it runs if .lastimport is 
>   older than n minutes

It could also check the timestamp of the import directory itself,
to perhaps detect the import more quickly.  So then we'd have both,
a check every n minutes, and a check whenever the import/ directory
obviously changed somehow.

We'd probably need to do the actual conversion as a background
task after handing the visitor's request, otherwise some unlucky
visitor could have a long wait as PmWiki performs the import
(especially if there are a lot of files, or if any of them
are particularly long).

> - to take all files in the import directory that have a name that
> meets the PmWiki naming conventions and to use their content as if a
> user had typed it in the PmWiki edit form

What authorship should it use in this case?  I guess this would
need to be set as a configuration variable.

> - then the imported file could be renamed (,imported012345678 for example).

If we remove the restriction of renaming the file, then the 
import/ directory doesn't need to be writable at all.  Or
perhaps we leave renaming of import files as a configuration
option.

Thanks!

Pm



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