[pmwiki-users] PData support for pagelisting images

Dominique Faure dominique.faure at gmail.com
Thu Sep 7 14:55:58 CDT 2006


On 9/7/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 10:43:04AM -0700, Martin Fick wrote:
> > --- "Patrick R. Michaud" <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > > One of the things that *greatly* concerns me about
> > > the {$:var} markup
> > > is that authors are going to get very confused by
> > > trying to put
> > > page variables in the values.
> > ...
> > > It gets worse when we have a page called SomePage
> > > with:
> > >
> > >     FirstName: Patrick
> > >     LastName: Michaud
> > >     FullName: {$:FirstName} {$:LastName}
> > >
> > > because an author using {SomePage$:FullName} is
> > > going to expect the result to
> > > grab the FirstName and LastName values out of
> > > SomePage and not the current page.
> >
> > I think that one solution to this would be the elusive
> > yet to be defined "this page" operator that has been
> > discussed many times on this list with reference to
> > page variables.  If this operator were say "==", this
> > dilema could be solved by this:
> >
> >      FirstName: Patrick
> >      LastName: Michaud
> >      FullName: {==$:FirstName} {==$:LastName}
> >
> > which no matter where it were referenced from
> > should be equivalent to:
> >
> >      FirstName: Patrick
> >      LastName: Michaud
> >      FullName: {SomePage$:FirstName} {SomePage$:LastName}
>
> I've been wondering if this goes the wrong way, and how
> much it would hurt existing sites to change things around
> at this point (possibly as a 2.2.0 release, if we do it).
>
> The fact that {$Name} always refers to the currently
> browsed page and [[OtherPage]] always refers to a page
> in the currently browsed group has long been a tricky/
> unintuitive point for authors, including somewhat experienced
> ones.
>
> For example, suppose we have a page called OtherGroup.XYZ,
> and it contains the markup
>
>     My name is {$Name}, and I can be found [[here]].
>
> Further, let's have a page called Main.ABC do
>
>     (:include OtherGroup.XYZ:)
>
> As PmWiki is written now, it does a straight text substitution,
> so that {$Name} and [[here]] are evaluated in the context of
> the including page.  Thus {$Name} becomes 'ABC' and [[here]]
> is a link to Main.Here, even though they originally came
> from OtherGroup.XYZ .  I know this catches a lot of people
> off-guard, because they expect {$Name} and [[here]] to
> always be related to the page in which they're written, as opposed
> to the one in which they're included.
>
> So, how much pain would we cause by switching this around now?
> If we fixed it so that {$Name} and [[link]] were always treated
> as being relative to the page in which they are written,
> we could introduce another form to refer to the currently
> browsed page.  Something like {==$Name}, or perhaps {*$Name}
> or {.$Name}.
>

I fear you're about to disinter the threads about hierarchic naming
conventions we had few months ago...

...anyway, we *need* an unequivocally way to address things like group
or page names, page properties,... from wathever place we are refering
from (other or including page, pagelist template,...).

[...]
>
> Any comments or thoughts on this idea?  Too radical for existing
> sites to swallow, or should I pursue it and see what happens?
>

I can't speak for those already managing hundreds of wiki pages in big
farms, since my current installations are not so plentiful, but I
would really have such features available somewhere to experiment
with.

Why not adopt a version numbering scheme equivalent to what we already
have in apache, linux,... aka reserve (odd for us) minor revision for
stable/trustworthy version and even ones for experimental features
such as these?

Dom




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