experimental plugin called subset

[ikiwiki.git] / doc / todo / pagespec_aliases.mdwn

diff --git a/doc/todo/pagespec_aliases.mdwn b/doc/todo/pagespec_aliases.mdwn
index 2db53d5454c52108f0528608995f2ae88174bc2c..6a213de0c2770c925aa3ae317a43877ac894a61a 100644 (file)
--- a/doc/todo/pagespec_aliases.mdwn
+++ b/doc/todo/pagespec_aliases.mdwn
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 [[!tag patch wishlist]]I quite often find myself repeating a boiler-plate
-pagespec chunk, e.g.
+[[ikiwiki/pagespec]] chunk, e.g.
 
     and !*.png and !*.jpg...
 
@@ -74,6 +74,26 @@ particular I imagine the strict/warnings stuff will make you puke.  Also, I'm
 not sure whether I should name-grab 'alias' since [[todo/alias_directive]] is
 an existing wishlist item.
 
+> I think it would make sense to have "pagespec" in the name somehow.
+>
+> No, the strict/warnings does not make me puke. Have you read my perl
+> code? :-P
+> 
+> Note that your XXX is right. It would be a security hole to not validate
+> `$key`, as anyone with websetup access could cause it to run arbitrary
+> perl code.
+> 
+> Well, except that websetup doesn't currently support configuring hashes
+> like used here. Which is a pity, but has led me to try to avoid using
+> such hashes in the setup file.
+> 
+> Have you considered not defining the pagespec aliases in the setup file, but
+> instead as directives on pages in the wiki? Using pagestate could store
+> up the aliases that have been defined. It could however, be hard to get
+> the dependencies right; any page that uses a pagespec containing 
+> an alias `foo` would need to somehow depend on the page where the alias
+> was defined. --[[Joey]] 
+
 Here's an example setup chunk:
 
      pagespec_aliases:
@@ -86,8 +106,39 @@ however, to add ' or internal()' to `boring`, for some reason.
 
 -- [[Jon]]
 
+> Probably needs to be `or internal(*)` --[[Joey]] 
+
 > another useful pagespec alias for large maps:
 
        basewiki: "sandbox or templates or templates/* or ikiwiki or ikiwiki/* or shortcuts or recentchanges or wikiicons/*"
 
 > -- [[Jon]]
+
+>> Useful indeed! --[[Joey]] 
+
+---------------------------
+
+Based on the above, I have written an experimental plugin called "subset".
+It's in my "ikiplugins" repo on github, in the "experimental" branch.
+<https://github.com/rubykat/ikiplugins/blob/experimental/IkiWiki/Plugin/subset.pm>
+
+It takes Joey's suggestion of defining the subsets (aliases) as directives;
+I took the example of the [[plugins/shortcut]] plugin and designated a single special page as the one where the directives are defined,
+though unlike "shortcut" I haven't hardcoded the name of the page; it defaults to "subsets" but it can be re-defined in the config.
+
+I've also added a feature which one might call subset-caching; I had to override `pagespec_match_list` to do it, however.
+An extra parameter added to `pagespec_match_list` called `subset` which
+
+* limits the result to look *only* within the set of pages defined by the subset (uses the "list" option to pagespec_match_list to do this)
+* caches the result of the subset search so that the second time subset "foo" is used, it uses the stored result of the first search for "foo".
+
+This speeds things up if one is using a particular subset more than once, which one probably is if one bothered to define the subset in the first place.
+The speed increase is most dramatic when the site has a large number of pages and the number of pages in the subset is small.
+(this is similar to the "trail" concept I used in my [[plugins/contrib/report]] plugin, but not quite the same)
+
+Note that things like [[plugins/map]] can't make use of "subset" (yet) because they don't pass along all the parameters they're given.
+But [[plugins/contrib/report]] actually works without alteration because it does pass along all the parameters.
+
+Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to do the dependencies - I'd really appreciate help on that.
+
+--[[KathrynAndersen]]