Directories in DWiki

DWiki encourages you to use directories to group DWiki pages together and to organize your DWiki's hierarchy of information. (Besides, since you're editing pages in Unix they're convenient for keeping the output of ls commands to a reasonable size.)

Unlike normal pages, directories clearly don't have ordinary text of their own to display. Instead, DWiki offers several 'views' of a directory's contents:

• the normal view just lists the directory's pages and subdirectories in a big list, sorted alphabetically.
• the blogdir view is a 'changelog' style display of every page in the directory, most recent to oldest.
• the blog view is like the blogdir view, except that it shows all pages under the directory (including pages in subdirectories), but only the first so many of them, and then provides a number of tools to navigate around all of these pages.

You can switch to different views of a directory by using the appropriate links in the Page Tools menu at the bottom of a directory's page.

Setting the default view for a directory

Directories normally default to being viewed in the normal view (that's why it's called that). However, if a file called .flag.prefview:<view> exists in a directory, that view becomes the default view instead.

If you make two or more files like that for different views, what happens is undefined. (Okay, DWiki picks one using arcane internal rules.)

Directory 'readme' files

If you create a file called __readme in a directory, it will be shown at the start of the text in the 'blog' and 'blogdir' views.

Directory-wide default permissions

You can set up default access permissions and commentability for everything under a directory by creating a file called __access in the directory and putting in appropriate CanComment and Restricted macros.

When it checks permissions, DWiki starts at the page and walks backwards up the directory hierarchy until it has to give up; the first __access file that has something to say about the thing in question (page access or commentability) is the one that wins.

This means that __access files lower in the directory hierarchy can give back access to things that a higher level took away. This is deliberate, but please be aware of it.