NewFeatures: Chronological entries

One obvious way of handling blogs with categories is to create appropriate directory hierarchies for each category, then hardlink a page's file into all of the appropriate 'category' directories. However, this raises a problem: DWiki's idea of a page's identity is its path.

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Directories can now have Readme files, called __readme. Readme files are injected into pages via the new renderer inject::readme (probably the first of several injectors).

The current templates don't inject __readme in normal directory views, but do inject them for blog and blogdir views (as you may see from this directory). Blog and blogdir views now drop all files starting with __, taking out __readme and __access and any future special magic files.

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DWiki can now generate Atom feeds for recently changed pages and recently made comments, either for the entire DWiki or for some subtree of it. For comments, this can be down to an individual article.

At the moment, pages in the Atom feed are rendered without macros except for CutShort, for efficiency reasons. All of the links are turned into absolute links (with http:// et al), since this is basically required. Nulled-out macros produce a small message to that effect in the generated content, so that people reading the Atom feed can tell that something is going on.

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The primary way of getting nested lists is now to indent the nested list entries relative to the parent list (entry). This looks visually better in plain ASCII for cases when there is a decent amount of text.

Although ChrisSiebenmann thought he wasn't going to, the old style of nesting lists (multiple list start characters, eg ***) still works. It turns out the GNU Emacs will properly autoindent for these lists but not for real indented lists, plus sometimes they actually look visually better.

The amount of old-style nesting is ignored in an indented context; it's treated as just a new level.

You can now use LinkAbbrevs by name (not by URL) without a |; ie, instead of writing [[<text>|]], you can just write [[<text>]]. This only happens if <text> wouldn't result in a link to a real page or an external URL if there was no abbreviation.

Thus, one can write [[Google http://www.google.com/]] in the page once, and later write [[Google]], and have it work out.

DWiki now lets you use spaces to separate things in [[....]] links instead of |. If you do this, the last word is taken as the link URL or page, and the rest are the link name. (| has priority over this; DWiki tries space-separation only if there is no |.)

Thus [[Google Rules The Web http://www.google.com/]] turns into Google Rules The Web.

You can use either side as an abbeviation later, for example: Google Rules The Web, Google Rules The Web. (See View Source.)

LinkAbbrevs done this way don't have to use |, as long as there is a space in the value: [[Google Rules The Web]] still turns into Google Rules The Web.

This allows somewhat more aesthetic long link name things.

Note that the opening [[ and the closing ]] have to be on the same line in the wikitext.

A DWiki RedirectFile can now point to absolute URLs as well as local DWiki pages. Absolute URLs are written like they would be in [[...]]; either http:// or <...>.

DWiki now supports generating links to URLs on the wiki's web server that are outside the DWiki itself. These are written as links in the format <...> and have to happen inside [[...]]. For example:

See [[the root of this web server|</>]].

generates a link to the DWiki's web server's root, which is all but certain to be outside the DWiki space if you're running DWiki as a CGI-BIN.

DWiki now remembers the name and URL for links that you write with [[...|...]] and thereafter allows you to omit one side of the |, at which point it will fill in the remembered values. This means that if you want to link to Google a lot in your document, you only have to write (eg) the URL once, and can thereafter refer to Google much more compactly.

This does collide a little bit with using [[...|]] to write totally unstyled text: it only comes out unstyled if it's not already been used as the name of a link.

For now I will live with that.

The RecentChanges DWikiText macro now accepts additional arguments that are the list of directories to restrict the listing to, or with a dash at the front, directories to exclude from the listing. If you combine both, both criteria must match: in an included directory and not excluded.

This lets a RecentChanges listing exclude areas that churn too much or are otherwise less interesting to list. (Perhaps, for example, a blog sub-hierarchy in a DWiki.)

If there is a common directory prefix that scanning is limited to, the scan is efficient: only that directory and lower is looked at at all.