The one feature I miss in Dokuwiki the most is some sort of Wiki trails. A Wiki trail is a sequence of pages that belong together (just like a book is a sequence of chapters). This concept is implemented in PMWiki and is useful for many things.
To create a Wiki trail an author would just have to create a trail index page in a form of a bullet or a numbered list. The page names should be the first item following each bullet. Something like this:
*[[Firstpage]]
*[[Secondpage]]
*[[Subpageofsecondpage]]
*[[Thirdpage]]
*[[Subpageofthirdpage]]
*[[Subpageofsubpageofthirdpage]]
The upper example could be parsed into a linear structure that would look like this.
Firstpage <-> Secondpage <-> Subpageofsecondpage <-> Thirdpage <-> Subpageofthirdpage <-> Subpageofsubpageofthirdpage
If we would include some sort of a trail markup in all of those pages, we could display navigation links in the form of
<< Previous page | Index page | Next page >>
We could even display navigation links with the actual page names, like this:
<< Firstpage | Index page name | Subpageofsecondpage >>
Hierarchical parsing would be useful for publishing pages (into pdf, latex, html or whatever). This way the Firstpage title would be displayed as the heading1, while the headings in that page would be mapped to headings one level deeper. But because the pages are hierarchically structured, the titles of subpages (as Subpageofsecondpage for instance) would be assigned heading2 and so on.
Well, with Wiki trails you have control over the order in which the pages are structured, whereas with namespaces the pages are sorted alphabetically.
What do you think about this concept? Do you think it would work, and is it possible to implement?
— Drye Kindrew 2006-10-13 08:08