[pmwiki-users] Create New Page templates

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 06:51:19PM -0400, Susan M. Garrett wrote:
> I've created a wiki where authors can post their fiction.  Right now

> Has anyone else tried something like this?  If so, what did you use
> and, more importantly, what did you start to use and then discard?

I use PmWiki for my fiction pages[1] too!  They are locked down for
editing; one has to have an user-and-password, and I create those by
hand rather than having an auto-register setup.  One reason is that it's
a small archive, and I want to know who is using it, and another reason
is that I set up a separate wiki-group for each author, and I need to
create those groups by hand.  I use per-group upload directories.

I use NewPageBoxPlus[2] with edit templates, with what I hope are
helpful instructions.  (The full instructions don't show unless one is
logged in; maybe I should change that?) I also made an edit form using
PmForm[3] and Show/Hide[4] to toggle whether the form is displayed (and
the form is only enabled when one is logged in).  I think I should
probably change it not to use templates for creating a new page, but a
special "new page" form, because people have found using the templates a
bit hard to understand; they're more comfortable with entering all the
information in a form.  I can't remember, though - can one add
attachments with PmForm?  This is important, because all stories are
uploaded as attachments. Every story has one wiki page; if it is a
multi-part story it simply has more than one attachment on that page.

I use Cluster[5] to make the fiction-related groups look like sub-groups
and I wrote Tagger[6] in order to make it easy to automatically index
stories by author, universe, series, category and so on.
The "root" group is Fiction, then we have index groups like
Fiction-Author and so on, and the actual author groups are
Fiction-Stories-(authorname), such as Fiction-Stories-KathrynAndersen.

That means, for example, that I can make a Fiction-Stories.GroupFooter
page, and it will be used for all pages in the Fiction-Stories groups.

I use IncludeUpload[7] to optionally display the shortest stories (and
the poetry) inline in the page (as well as having them as a separate
attachment).

I use FauxTrail[8] (in GroupFooter pages) to show not only the other pages
in the group, but for the Fiction-Stories story pages it also shows
links to other stories in a series, if the $:Series PTV isn't empty.
(See example[9])

I also made a bunch of custom pagelist formats (in PHP, not in the
template language) which I haven't made into a Cookbook recipe because I
figured they were too specialized.

If I were starting again from scratch (too late now, it would break
external links) I would make the Fiction-Stories groups have per-page
upload directories, and use Attachtable[10] in a GroupFooter to list the
attachments.  Why?  Because it makes it easier for multi-part stories;
one just has to upload the story and each part will automatically be
listed in a nice table.

[1] http://www.katspace.org/Fiction
[2] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/NewPageBoxPlus
[3] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/PmForm
[4] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/ShowHide
[5] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Cluster
[6] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Tagger
[7] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/IncludeUpload
[8] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/FauxTrail
[9] http://www.katspace.org/Fiction/Stories/BrendaBailey/VegasInCascade
[10] http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Attachtable

Kathryn Andersen
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