[Phpwiki-talk] some questions

[Jan H. <hi...@wi...>]

Hello Steve and everybody,

There are some questions I would like to ask about phpwiki but not before I
have said that I have used it a little now and really like it, especially
its simplicity and accessability. I have plans of using it to set up some
kind of FAQ / dictionary for database theory or even something with a
broader scope like www.foldoc.org.

So here are my questions:

1. What is the relationship between phpwiki and pwiki?

The projects look very similar to me, although pwiki seems heavier on
features (not neccessarily a good thing). Are there plans for cooperation in
the future?

2. Is [link name|PageName] considered not WikiWiki?

It is my opinion that this would be a very logical and useful extension; it
solves some problems such as unnatural WikiWikiNames and plurals. I foudn a
"patch" by Antti Kaihola but that doesn't work for the latest version. So I
made a new one for the latest version of phpwiki. Is anyone interested in
that or am I just making it harder for myself to migrate to the next
version? :-)

During my efforts to get this done I noticed a minor bug in the function
ExtractWikiPageLinks. If you have something in your text like "[[not a
link]" then the page name "[not a link" is extracted as a link name and
turns up, for example, in MySQL in the table wikilinks. My patch also fixes
this.

3. Are square brackets in page names allowed?

If you try things like "[link[3]]" or "[ [[link]" or "[ a[[a]]a ]" you will
see some funny symbols appearing in the output. Maybe this has something to
do with tokenization inside page names that is not taken into account?

The way that things are implemented now, you can never have a closing
bracket inside a page name. I think that is an unnecessary restriction. To
solve this I would suggest that closing brackets should also be escaped,
i.e., ']' should be written as ']]' if it is not meant as an end of a page
name. As far as I can see this is not very hard to implement with
regular expressions. You can, for instance, recognize bracketed links
because they begin with an uneven number of '['s and end with an uneven
number of ']'s.

Anyway, these were my questions. I hope you will find some time to answer
them.

Kind regards,

-- Jan Hidders