[pmwiki-announce] Notes and plans for PmWiki 2.1

[Patrick R. Michaud]

Hello, all-

I just wanted to give everyone an advance look at my plans
the next few versions of PmWiki, to invite comments and
suggestions.

First, I'm expecting the next few releases to be tagged as
2.1.beta1, 2.1.beta2, etc., and ultimately culminate in a 2.1.0
release a week or two from now.  The reason for assigning a
new major release number here is simply to let site administrators
know that they may want to double-check site configurations and
the release notes before applying the upgrade, not because the
changes are really all that significant.  It also will give
recipe authors a bit of breathing space to double-check recipes
against the new features before they're tagged "official".  

Again, I don't expect anything in 2.1 to cause significant problems
for existing sites or recipes, I'm just using the major release
number to make sure everyone knows that there's a higher-than-normal
possibility for them.

I've created a PITS entry for the 2.1 release at
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/00565, which is also reproduced
below.  As always, all of the items are configurable by the
admin to be able to continue to use the 2.0 default settings if
desired.

Currently slated for 2.1:

* PITS:00520 - Wikiwords disabled by default
* PITS:00556 - non-existent pages produce "Page Not Found" and 404 response
* PITS:00522 - allow InterMap entries to come from a Site.InterMap page
* PITS:00562 - whitespace used for nesting within lists
* PITS:00459 - ability to create shared groups/pages for farm installations
* PITS:00563 - hide ?action= links from web spiders and robots 
* PITS:00560 - correct bug with (:include PageName#from#:)
* Cookbook.TitledLinks - add pagelink w/title markup [[PageName|+]] 

Under consideration (these items could use votes and/or feedback to 
help decide their fate):

* PITS:00558 - allow redirects to anchors in pages
* PITS:00542 - Add fmt=authtable to distribution (also PITS:00114)
* Revise ?action=rss to use pagelist as source
* Add ?action=dc 

For those who recall that the 2.0 release was in "beta" status
for nine months where lots of significant changes were being made --
this won't be anything like that.  The long duration of 2.0.beta
was because we were moving from 1.0.x to an entirely new implementation
(2.0.0).  Developing 2.1.0 from 2.0.x is a much quicker process and
doesn't involve as many fundamental code changes.

And yes, I know that the 2.1 release still doesn't contain some 
of the highest priority PITS items such as table-of-contents, blogging
features, and comments pages.  I'm wanting to go ahead and take
care of the "low hanging fruit" before I tackle the more significant
design and development that these other items will likely require.

Comments and questions welcomed, either on the mailing list or
on the relevant PITS pages.

Pm