[pmwiki-users] (:title:) misfeature (was: Odd phenom/apparent bug? on pmwiki.org)

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Sun Mar 26 19:54:02 CST 2006


On Sunday, 26 March 2006 8:52 AM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
>On Sat, Mar 25, 2006 at 08:05:33AM -0600, Tegan Dowling wrote:
>>    If you go to http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/MarkupExtensions, you'll
>>    see its title appears to be "Abbreviation Plurals".  I could find no
>>    (:title:) setting for the page, but I did find that a reference to the
>>    actual page Cookbook/AbbreviationPlurals is the first item in the
>>    (:pagelist:) example that Christian Ridderstrom put at the very foot of
>>    the page. 
>> 
>>    No doubt this is the source of the page-title, but how,
>and what to do?
>
>This is a known (mis)feature; the (:title:) directive from
>included pages can inadvertently override or become a title for
>the page that includes it.  Some people have indicated that they
>want to be able to specify (:title:) in includes, and even if this
>weren't the case I'm not sure that I know of a reliable workaround
>for the behavior, short of hardcoding something directly into
>pmwiki.php.
>
>Pm
>
One obvious approach would be to separate page data from page 
metadata, with a separate edit form for a page's metadata. The 
descriptive metadata are the current (:title:), (:keywords:) 
and (:description:) directives.

Advantages:
- eliminates the issue of inadvertent metadata arising from
  include and other features

- separates out the invisible and position-independent 
  content from the displayed page content

- allows a page to inherit some or all its descriptive
  metadata from another page

- makes the metadata explicit -- prompts for title, keywords
  and description instead of learning 3 directives

Disadvantages:
- adds a new history stream requirement -- one may want to
  know the history of the metadata

- potentially confusing -- 2 edit actions and screens instead
  of 1

- backwards compatibility -- would have to extract the
  information from existing pages

I would not include categories in such a scheme, as an author
will wish to control placement of category links on the page.

Just my 10¢ (as 5¢ joins 2¢ down the drain of history)...

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin






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