[pmwiki-users] Utility pages

[Patrick R. Michaud]

With this message I'll try to review the options discussed thus far,
offer some opinions, and then let's see if we can come to a decision
that most of us can live with.

Background: PmWiki comes distributed with a number of default pages 
that--for a variety of reasons--likely don't belong in the PmWiki group.  
Traditionally these "utility" pages have been placed in the "Main" group:

    Main.AllRecentChanges
    Main.AllRecentUploads      (not currently used in 2.0)
    Main.SearchWiki
    Main.PageNotFound
    Main.SideBar
    Main.ApprovedUrls
    Main.Blocklist

Other utility pages have appeared in the PmWiki group, but perhaps
do not belong there:

    PmWiki.EditQuickReference
    PmWiki.UploadQuickReference
    PmWiki.WikiHelp            (never been terribly useful)

We've also discussed the possibility that the edit form, and possibly
other pages, would themselves be configured using wiki pages:

    ????.EditForm              (proposed, see Test.EditForm on pmwiki.org)

In addition, we've discussed having a standard page in the
distribution that would contain a list of available actions --
so far we've talked about placing such as page in a group
called "PmWikiAdmin":

    PmWikiAdmin.ActionList     (proposed)

Finally, when PmWiki is first installed the site is given a
default starting page, called "Main.HomePage".  The starting
location for pages is configured via the $DefaultGroup, $DefaultName,
and $DefaultPage variables.

    Main.HomePage
    Main.WikiSandbox

There are basically three issues we have to resolve:
    1.  Where should the "utility" pages go (i.e., what should this
        utility group be called)?
    2.  What variable should we use to configure the location of the
        utility pages?
    3.  How do we migrate to choices #1 and #2 without drastically
        breaking things in the process?

I think we should resolve the questions in the order given above -- i.e.,
I'm more interested in getting the location of the pages right than worrying
about what the configuration variable will be called.  So, let's look at
possible names for the utility pages, and my comments for each

  Main
    What we've been using, and it doesn't seem to work.  Next candidate. 
  PmWikiAdmin, PmWikiSupport
    Thus far, the most popular choices.  But they're a bit long --
    I'd get annoyed seeing PmWikiAdmin.AllRecentChanges all the time.
  Site
    Actually, this one is growing on me the more I think about it --
    Site.AllRecentChanges, Site.SearchWiki, Site.EditForm, Site.ActionList,
    Site.EditQuickReference, etc.  all seem to work very well.  The downside 
    is that it encroaches on sites that want to use "Site" as a group--
    but I suspect that's not common (and the few sites that want to do
    this can move the default Site.* pages to another group).
  Admin
    I know too many sites that may want to use the group name "Admin"
    for something other than PmWiki administration.  Next.
  PmWikiSettings, Config
    The problem I have with names like "settings" or "config" is that
    many of the utility pages (AllRecentChanges, EditQuickReference,
    SearchWiki) aren't really "configuration" -- there seems to be
    a mismatch there.
  Utility, Util, UtilGroup
    These aren't too bad, except that it removes "Utility" as a possible
    group name for a site to use.  Plus it seems long to type.
  Common, CommonGroup
  Shared, SharedGroup
    Not bad, but somehow I think someone might be confused into thinking
    that the pages that appear in this group are somehow forwarded to
    every group, or are somehow "global". 
  Meta, MetaGroup
    For many of us, the name "MetaGroup" conjures up images of an
    organization infamous for having produced some biased technology
    studies about Windows vs. Linux servers...  ick.
  Aux, AuxGroup, Etc, ETC
    These aren't too bad, they're nice and short and aren't likely
    to interfere with other desirable group names.  But they're not 
    all that obvious, either...
  Farm, Field
    These have possibilities, especially where wikifarms are concerned,
    but may be confusing for people who aren't running wikifarms.

Of the above, my favorite is now "Site".  It's short, and reasonably
descriptive of its contents.  My previous objection to the
"Site" proposal was that I didn't like "Site.HomePage" as the default 
starting page, but since we're now likely to be making a distinction 
between the "home" group and the "utility pages" group we can leave 
the default starting point as "Main.HomePage" without any difficulty.

If we go with "Site", I think the obvious configuration variable name 
for it is $SiteGroup.

Comments, reactions?

If we get reasonable agreement about the group name, we then have to
figure out a migration strategy to get to the new framework without
totally destroying existing sites.  But let's see how much agreement
we have on the naming issues first...

Pm