[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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