[pmwiki-users] [pmwiki-devel] about proposed new LinkPageCreateFmt

Petko Yotov 5ko at 5ko.fr
Sun Feb 7 09:54:51 CST 2010


On Sunday 07 February 2010 13:15:52, V.Krishn wrote :
> I am guessing it means rel='nofollow'  is honored by all bots?

At least those bots responsible for 98%-99% of your search engine visitors -- 
from Google, Yahoo and MSN/Bing. See :
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

> Would not a single link serve the purpose?
> Two links could be an issue with some Js GUIs and
> is some cases with styling.
> But yes in most cases it can be solved by setting
> .createlink { display:none; }
> But then the whole idea of "?" in the link is lost.

I can only guess why Patrick implemented it this way. At the beginning of 
wikis, among the few wikis available, there were two types of links to 
inexistant pages :
* an underlined link with a different color and no "?", or
* just unclickable plain text followed by a "?"-link to the edit form. 

People used to one or the other type of wikis, would not be confused if they 
start contributing to a pmwiki.

The "?"-link also provides better usability to visitors with text browsers 
like "lynx" which do not support CSS and colors.

So, these may be the reasons for us to have both an underlined link and the 
question mark. 

MediaWiki (Wikipedia) allows registered users to select one or the other types 
of links. PmWiki allows you (and skin authors) to completely configure how you 
want these links displayed.

For example, I often use this format:
  $LinkPageCreateFmt = "<a rel='nofollow' class='createlinktext'
    href='\$PageUrl'>\$LinkText</a>";

This doesn't link to the edit form but to the empty "not found" page which I 
believe is less confusing for readers then an "enter password" form. Moreover, 
I try not to have such links for a long time.

Petko

P.S. http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/RemoveQuestionMark


> > On Tuesday 02 February 2010 12:08:36, V.Krishn wrote :
> > > $LinkPageCreateFmt
> > >     The (HTML) string to output for links to non-existent wiki pages.
> > > The default is to add a '?' after the link text with a link to the page
> > > edit/create form. Defaults to
> > >
> > >         <a class='createlinktext'
> > >  href='\$PageUrl?action=edit'>\$LinkText</a> <a class='createlink'
> > >  href='\$PageUrl?action=edit'>?</a>
> > >
> > > Are two same broken links  SEO friendly?
> >
> > Both have  rel='nofollow'  and search engines will not use those links
> > when calculating the PageRank (or similar priority/weight number). So
> > yes, two are as friendly as one.



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