idea

Here's a thought I just had:

Maybe it would make sense to have something like "virtual pages". A virtual page is a subpage of another page, lets make an example, I'll explain the meaning later:

Lets say I want the following pages:

Now, normally I'd have to write a bunch of pages (in this example 4).

The idea now is that we have a special new formatter that is capable of handling virtual pages (by way of returning a True in something like formatter.possiblyCreatesVirtualPages() :)

One note first: editing virtual pages should not be possible.

Now when the wiki encounters a page it cannot find, it will ask the parent page of the requested page if it can produce that page. That way, a special formatter could create a whole sub-tree of pages, my example above could be created by _only_ editing the PageStart page and the special formatter could then also let the virtual pages be visible.

technicalities

Need to think of:

rationale

I had this idea when I thought of saving a single docbook document on the wiki and displaying it as the generated HTML text :)

-- JohannesBerg 2004-10-01 07:56:20

We can use a wiki to share a document wrriten in xml, just like any code that we can share. But why create virtual pages? if the document is very long and need many sections, use one wiki page per section. How people will edit a very long docbook text anyway? We can use a special parser to parse the document section and display them as usual. But I don't know if docbook parser is within the scope of this project. -- NirSoffer 2004-10-01 09:10:17

Ok, I see I have to be a bit more verbose: I have done this already. A docbook parser that generates several HTML-Pages that can be viewed in the wiki. Additional single chapters of this docbook document can be edited. The implementation is a bit different from the one described above. The source is in one big page. It uses an URL parameter "subpage" with is the number of the chapter. The ability to display the subpage is build into the parser. The new EditChapter action is additionally supplied with a "split" parameter which is a regular expression that tells the action how to detect the single chapters in the source. (I am aware that this leads to the same bug we had in the TableOfContents macro)

My implementation (for MoinMoin 1.0 - so it will need some adjustment) can be found on my test wiki. It is not installed there currently as it runs 1.3 right now. But some documentation and the source can be found there.

EditChapter is already on the todo list for a while. To volunteer please add your name to MoinMoinTodo/Release 1.4.

-- FlorianFesti 2004-10-01 09:47:17

MoinMoin: JohannesBerg/SplittedPages (last edited 2007-10-29 19:19:18 by localhost)