PmWiki | Cookbook / AlternateNamingScheme

Summary: Use other naming schemes for PmWiki pages

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Question

Is it possible to use PmWiki with another naming scheme for the pages? For example, instead of CamelCaseNames using underscore_separated_names?

Answer

Yes. PmWiki is structured in such a way that it is relatively easy to make very drastic changes to its behavior.

The most popular alternative naming scheme is using underscores to separate the words of page names. But this is not by any means the only possibility. Two solutions are offered here.

First Case (the packaged solution)

Alternative scheme for wikiword spacing, using underscores to represent spaces in page names.

For sites where the administrator wants to set $SpaceWikiWords to true some common problems arise. For example, those pages are not quite right: War and Peace ?, Novell NetWare ?, Apple iTunes ?, James McGregor ?, Community of Practice ?. References are fine, but the spaced page names may not be (War And Peace, Novell Net Ware, Apple I Tunes, James Mc Gregor, Community Of Practice). There are 2 issues: inappropriate spacing and inappropriate capitalisation.

This first bundled solution tries to enhance the power of the current AsSpaced function. From an author's perspective, using [[ ... ]] markup gives you the page name you ask for; only the first letter gets capitalised and spacing is preserved as entered. The script implements the following alternative page naming algorithm:

upshift the first letter (names must start with an upper case letter or number)
turn spaces into underscores
an alternate AsSpaced function changes underscores into spaces
a new SpaceWikiWords function spaces wiki words on entry
an alternate MakePageName function applies the algorithm to names (the $Name, not the $Group)
expand the list of likely homonyms in $PagePathFmt
use the $Title instead of the $Name in RecentChanges and search results

It is fairly liberal in its treatment of wiki words, looking to see if Wiki_Word and then WikiWord exist. NewPage becomes New_Page by default, but an author can always prevent spaces by writing [[NewPage]] if appropriate (for example FileMaker ?. It sets the $DefaultName to 'Home_Page' but will still find Main.HomePage correctly.

So, on with the files:

spacewikiwords.php Δ -- download the file and add the following line to local/config.php

  include_once("local/spacewikiwords.php");

Second case (the freeform way)

The PmWiki naming scheme is governed by a variable named $MakePageNamePatterns. Actually, Patrick suggested this approach.

The default declaration of said variable is:

$MakePageNamePatterns = array(
    "/'/" => '',                           # strip single-quotes
    "/[^$PageNameChars]+/" => ' ',         # convert non-alnums to spaces
    "/((^|[^-\\w])\\w)/e" 
      => "strtoupper('$1')",               # initial caps after spaces
    "/ /" => ''                            # strip spaces
);

Those are regular expressions that are aplied to the text inside [[ ]] freelink markups. You have to change it to suit your ideas of how pages should be named. As you might have noticed, regular expressions are very powerfull, and almost anything could be done this way.

To separate words in pagenames with underscores, you would have to change the last of those 4 rules to:

    "/\\s+/" => '_'                        # Convert spaces to underscores

Thus, Documentation index becomes "Documentation_Index".

The third rule (the one with strtoupper function) is responsible for the automatic up-casing of letters. If you want to upcase only the first letter of the pagename (so that Documentation index becomes "Documentation_index"), you could do:

    "/(^\\w)/e" => "strtoupper('$1')",     # initial caps

(Beware, if you do NOT uppercase the first letter of your pagenames, the wiki will stop recognizing them as files, and you will need to alter the variables:

    $GroupPattern = '[\\w]*(?:-\\w+)*';
    $NamePattern = '[\\w]*(?:-\\w+)*';

If the wiki can then do a case-insensitive search for the corresponding page file, this should go a long way.

AlternateNamingScheme

Question

Answer

First Case (the packaged solution)

Second case (the freeform way)

Notes

Releases

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Contributors

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