[Pmwiki-users] Re: Re: Getting rid of the group 'Main'

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Tue Feb 17 22:24:51 CST 2004


On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 06:04:28AM +0100, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> > 
> > So, I think I'll leave it as Main/SearchWiki and we'll document it in
> > the "how do I change the default group?" section.
> 
> I still don't understand what's wrong with PmWiki/SearchWiki. Could you 
> explain that?

Well, there's nothing seriously "wrong" with it, but it (along with some
other stuff) just doesn't fit my conception of how things ought to work.
Consider what happens if, as you suggest:
  - we get rid of the distributed Main.SideBar, replacing it with
    a distributed PmWiki.SideBar
  - we move the Main.SearchWiki page to PmWiki.SearchWiki

Now, when someone clicks a SearchWiki link to do a search, or views
search results, they're suddenly seeing all of this "PmWiki" stuff 
in the sidebar, when the site (and search) likely have nothing
to do specifically with PmWiki.  (The PmWiki sidebar will appear by 
default because it's a group-specific sidebar, overriding the site-wide 
bar wherever it may happen to be.)  

Because searching is often a site-wide sort of operation, it makes 
sense to me that SearchWiki and search results are placed in a group
associated with the site and not with PmWiki documentation.  By default
that group is "Main".

(In some twisted sense perhaps the fact that "Main" is not a particularly 
good group name works somewhat to PmWiki's advantage, since it's not likely 
that someone will want to use "Main" as a group name for something else.  
IOW, it's just good enough to get things started, but also entices admins 
to soon ask "How can I change this to something better?" and then they 
can pick a name that's extremely appropriate for their site, as you have 
done with "LyX".  I know, it's a weak argument, but... :-)

Pm



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