[Pmwiki-users] pmwiki-0.4.beta1 release available

[Patrick R. Michaud]

Hi, all!  I'm releasing a beta version of pmwiki-0.4.x for people to
begin examining and evaluating.

IMPORTANT NOTE:  This software is definitely a beta version!  Do not 
attempt to upgrade existing softwares to this version, nor should you
use this version for a production-level system!  It's really for 
evaluation, planning, and development purposes only.  

If you want to play with pmwiki-0.4.x, I recommend downloading it and
setting it up as a separate site.  Or, if you just want to play with
some of the new features and follow development progress without doing
an install, you can go to http://www.pmichaud.com/wikitest and follow 
links from there and see what others are testing/doing.

PmWiki version 0.4.beta1 has a lot of significant internal changes from the 0.3.x releases. The $MapPatterns array no longer exists, it has been replaced by $LinkPatterns and $InterMapUrls. The Anchor() subroutine is also gone, it has been replaced by a number of admin-configurable subroutines. 

The most significant change in PmWiki is the inclusion of support for FreeLinks. FreeLinks simplify the naming and linking to other pages and allow for a wider variety of characters to be used in page titles. FreeLinks are controlled by the $FreeLinkPattern variable. 

Site administrators can select how wiki links will be rendered by setting the $WikiPageFmt, $WikiPageCreateFmt, and $WikiPageCreateSpacesFmt format specifiers. The first variable specifies the rendering for links to existing pages, the second is the links to be rendered to non-existent pages, and the third is the rendering of links to non-existing pages that have spaces in the anchor text. 

Most of the scripts in the scripts/ subdirectory have not been updated yet to be compatible with the new version.  In particular, the wikitrails.php and includeurl.php modules likely do not function properly.

In addition, a site-administrator can use the $LinkPatterns array to specify admin-defined subroutines that should be called for completely customized control of anchor rendering. Overall the entire link-handling code is greatly improved over pmwiki-0.3, it is much more efficient and has a much greater degree of customizability and flexibility available. 

Beyond this, there have been a lot of design and internal improvements to the PmWiki software.  The next phases of development will focus on bring the pmwiki-0.4 code up to "production" quality, and to greatly improve the user and administrator-level documentation that comes with PmWiki.

Again, I would really appreciate any suggestions or feedback you all can give me regarding the new release of this software.  Email is my preferred mechanism of communication at the moment, or you can set up test cases on the wiki stie to demonstrate how a feature is broken/ought to work/doesn't work, etc.

Pm