Re: (Long) Rewrite Rules for Wiki (was Re: Wiki)

On Monday 21 March 2005 12:46 am, msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
> Hi Randy, I RTFM'd but didn't work out how to actually create an
> AbiWordDevelopment Twiki page?

You (or BirchKnutson) are very close--if you go and look at

http://www.abisource.org/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/WebHome

you'll see a blue question mark after the phrase "AbiWordDevelopment?" -- if
you click on that question mark you will be led through the process of
creating the page. More below.

> BTW I changed the ancient blurb on the front AbiWord page to more
> accurately reflect the current state of things.
>
> I'd like to start putting some content there.

Wonderful!

> Also how does one create a new page under exisitng directories?

The canonical way to create a new page is to edit an existing page by adding a
(T)WikiName on that page. The (T)WikiName can either be "traditional" (i.e.,
CamelCase), or you can force a link using double square brackets, with or
without a link name:

   * [[a forced link]] will display (on the edited page) as "a forced
link?" (with highlighting)--the created page will be named AForcedLink

   * [[a forced link][linkname]] will display (on the edited page) as
"linkname?" (with highlighting)--the created page will be named AForcedLink

Some related notes:

   1. After the page is created, the question mark is no longer displayed,
just the link name highlighted

   2. TWiki maintains what they call a "breadcrumb trail". For example, the
breadcrumb trail for http://www.abisource.org/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/WebHome
is:

   TWiki . Abiword . WebHome

(in the above case, TWiki followed by the Webname (Abiword) followed by the
page (topic) name (WebHome))

For purposes of the breadcrumb trail, the page from which the new page is
"spawned" is treated as the parent of the new page, so the breadcrumb trail
for your new page (AbiWordDevelopment) (assuming you create it by clicking on
the question mark on the WebHome page) will be:

   TWiki . Abiword . WebHome . AbiWordDevelopment

The bread crumb trail can be adjusted later, but it is somewhat slow /
painful. (Click on "More" at the bottom of a page, and look for the option
to change the page's parent.)

   3. I sometimes cheat to create a new page, by simply typing a new
(nonexisting) page name in the address bar--when TWiki can't find that page
it offers to create it for you. The problem is that the parent is usually
not what you want (IIRC, the parent is just the web).

   4. There are gotchas with respect to allowed (T)Wiki page names. In RE
terms, this is pretty close to the canonical requirement:

   [A-Z]+[a-z]+[A-Z]\w*

IIRC, a few punctuation marks are allowed (maybe only the underbar). You can
get around that requirement to a certain extent by using the [[][]] notation,
but I wouldn't do that until you are more familiar with some of the
restrictions. There are also variations of the [[][]] that allow you to
specify a page in a different web, or to specify an anchor somewhere on a
page. I hesitate to try to cover all these here (and they are covered
elsewhere), but if you need/want the information, just ask.

   5. Actually, many wiki'ers call a link created with the double bracket
notation a free link--to me it's a forced link.

regards,
Randy Kramer

PS: If we adjust the TWiki page template to fit better with the remainder of
the Abiword site, I suppose we might eliminate the bread crumb trail, so it
may not be so important to keep it "right".
Received on Mon Mar 21 16:05:00 2005