[Pmwiki-users] Hierarchical groups
J. Perkins
jason
Wed Jun 9 06:32:32 CDT 2004
Okay, I'm trying to catch up now...
Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>>I'd like to see the parent operator as / since that's what used in OS's
>
> I think you're confusing "parent operator" with "path separator".
> In most OS's (DOS, Windows, Unix), the name ".." is used to refer to
> a parent directory.
I guess I've implied that I like this approach by implementing it, but
for the record, after trying a couple of different methods, I think
using the Unix path conventions is the cleanest way to implement nested
pages, both in usage and implementation (and in case anyone missed it
before, you can try it out for yourself at
http://www.sim8.com/wikibox/wiki.php?page=/HomePage, feel free to edit)
I'd be happy to debate whether this is too complex for new users. IMHO
this is not true.
> I think that some authors may have trouble with the '..' syntax if
> they aren't used to dealing with pathnames.
I would consider ".." to be advanced markup. I would teach people to
write [[/Group/Page]] most of the time, which isn't much of a switch
from the existing scheme.
>>[[../../WorkingTogether]] would point to NFL.WorkingTogether, which
>>would be the same as writing [[/WorkingTogether]].
>
> Huh? I would think that [[/WorkingTogether]] would be WorkingTogether
> at the top level.
I agree with Pm here. It should be [[/NFL/WorkingTogether]].
> Also, if we went to a filename-path sort of system, I wouldn't think we'd
> ever need "default pages" in groups such as "HomePage", because every group
> is already a page.
Right, no more default pages. I rarely used them myself, or I set them
to be the same as the group name.
> And, another issue just occurred to me regarding hierarchical groups--
> what about group passwords and permissions, how do they play out?
I haven't gotten this far yet. I would expect that children would
inherit from their parents. If you want to unprotect a child you must
set it specifically. Protecting a parent and unprotecting all of the
children would/should be a rather unusual case
One important thing I haven't worked out yet is the proper handling of
the .. operator. If I am at "NFL.Teams.Patriots.Playoffs" and I type
[[../Washington]], does that take me to "NFL.Teams.Washington" or
"NFL.Teams.Patriots.Washington"? To keep the filesystem analogy it
should probably be the first. Again, I consider ".." to be a power-user
markup, use [[/NFL/Teams/Washintgon]] instead. I would also consider
nesting this deep to be a power-user thing, I would encourage most wikis
to stick to one level.
Anothing thing not mentioned is the whole idea that
[[Group/Page]] => "Page"
[[Group.Page]] => "Group.Page"
Personally, I always found this confusing and somewhat arbitrary. IMHO,
always use the first form and get rid of the second. If you want to
display the full path, type it out. Very often you want to use a
different separator string anyway
[[Group/Page | Group::Page]]
Whatever you decide to do, I hope that you will make it "pluggable" like
the other parts of the system. Or maybe I don't...I can't tell you how
much time I've blown fooling around with this damn thing. ;)
Jason
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