[pmwiki-users] Kind-of Blog 1.1 released

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Dec 14 14:41:49 CST 2005


On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 08:58:10PM +0100, sven saurwein wrote:
> (4.2)
> use the abstract yyyymmddxx uniqute url for (:pagelist:) flexibility to 
> display and sort things

(:pagelist:) already has the flexibility to display and sort
things, and can sort based on criteria other than name (e.g.,
posting date or last modified date).  So we don't need to use 
the page name for ordering, since we can easily do it other ways.

But there's another approach.... everyone repeat after me...



                 "Trails are our friends!"



Why worry about the names at all?  All we really want is some way of
ordering sets of posts and accessing them in some order, and that's
exactly what trails are for!  So, having seen the discussion and 
taken a little more time to think about it, here's my view of a blog:

*  All blog entries are normal wiki pages, with normal page names.

*  The edit form has a "post blog article" checkbox or button, which
   causes the current entry to be added to the beginning of a 
   "blog trail", much the same way that pages are automatically 
   added to RecentChanges pages.  (It may in fact turn out to be 
   the same code that handles both.)  

*  Other posts to the page don't affect the blog trail.

*  By having the pages on a blog trail, one gets RSS feeds (and
   podcasts!) for free via .../BlogTrail?action=rss .

*  The blogger always has the option of reordering articles in
   the blog by simply editing the blog trail.  Articles in the
   blog trail can easily belong to different WikiGroups.

*  WikiTrail markup provides an easy mechanism to go from one
   article in the blog trail to the next.

*  Since (:pagelist:) can get a list of pages from a trail,
   one can easily display the blog in a number of different
   formats by using (:pagelist trail=BlogTrail fmt=...:),
   where we can use custom fmt= options for different looks,
   and do things such as insert dates at the top of each
   blog entry.

*  For example, (:pagelist trail=BlogTrail fmt=titles count=10:)
   could display a simple list of pages by their titles, while
   (:pagelist trail=BlogTrail fmt=include paras=3 count=10:) 
   could display the first three paragraphs of each of the 
   10 most recent articles in the blog.  Of course, one could use
   order=-time or order=-ctime to order the entries based
   on the most recent update or the date of creation.

Comments?  If there's roaring approval then it's very possible
I could add the above directly to 2.1.  Page comments would
follow shortly thereafter, since I'd know how to integrate it with
the blogging scheme.

Pm




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