Re: [Phpwiki-talk] some questions

[Steve W. <sw...@wc...>]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Jan Hidders wrote:

> 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

Glad you like it!

> 1. What is the relationship between phpwiki and pwiki?

I don't think I've ever installed Pwiki... is that the purely OOD PHP
wiki? Oh, that's John Jorgensen's. I have installed that.

There's no formal connection but he was an early tester of PhpWiki last
December... he also let me keep the name PhpWiki. He was going to use it
but never released anything under that name. We haven't shared much code.
I recall a discussion on regexps to match links, which was and still is a
tricky thing to do.

> 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?

No, not at this time.

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

It is now :-) Arno added this in the last few weeks, and if you try a
nightly build you'll see it works. I just tested it.


> 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.

Confirmed on my Postgresql installation... nice catch!

> 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 funny symbols are the $FieldSeparator tokens we use as placeholders...
something pathological is happening here.

> 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

Well, can you give some reasons why it should be allowed? I now regret
allowing [link] notation. I think a more flexible BumpyText pattern would
have served us better. I would never go back at this point of course, but
this touches on the larger issue of Wiki useability. If all the links are
consistently BumpyCaseLinks, I think the Wiki gains a little in
consistency and usability. Others disagree, and since I'm a nice guy we
have and will keep [bracket links]. :-)

> 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.

That's logically consistent... What do you think Arno?

thx Jan!
sw

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