[pmwiki-users] Change default page name separator to "-", ie "Page-Name"

[Ed W]

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 06:16:05PM +0000, Ed W wrote:
>   
>> Given that I notice PmWiki moving away from CamelCase wiki words, it
>> seems like there should be little resistance to proposing a change in
>> the default URL naming convention also...
>>     
>
> I'm fully in favor of this, *if* we can find a way to make the
> change without breaking existing sites.  But in my experience 
> ranks up there with "convert PmWiki's default to utf8" in terms 
> of actual difficulty of achieving the result.
>
> I can't tell you how important it is to PmWiki _not_ to introduce
> changes that break existing sites, except perhaps on a major
> revision number change.
>   

OK, well I'm for being the guineapig...!!

I think as Dave says, it starts with "MakePageNamePatterns".  I agree
that going lower case would also be desirable

This then causes a bunch of changes that we might as well try and thrash
out here and see if we can't get a solution worked out.

For backwards compatibility I think we need to look at the names on
disk.  We could do something like look for a dashed name and use that. 
If not found then look for backwards compatible name.  Two options
spring to mind, either update that old name on page save, or offer an
"action" which renames *all* pages to the new name

(The nice thing about dashed names is that we don't loose any
information about how to build the old style camel case name.  Well,
generally not at least... )

Final backwards compatible issue is external links in going to the old
style names.  I think it's best to issue a 301 redirect to these so that
google etc dont penalise for duplicate content.  I guess best to handle
this with a function on the 404 not found page (as per the Cookbook
example for case insensitive URLS - another nice thing that would be
good to have in core...)

Anyone spot anything I have missed?  (At least in big picture terms)

Ed W

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