Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] How is hierarchy supposed to work?

[jorge]

There are (in my personal experience) more or less three features/pitfalls in 
the
actual implementation of subdirectory handling in emacs-wiki.

- recursive publishing: All subdirectories of a Wiki directory are
  published.  This is nice if they contain publishable material.  If
  your publishing directory however is a subdirectory of the Wiki
  directory, (./html), it is recursively replicated by the publishing
  project, and all *.html files are converted into *.html.html, and so
  forth.

- images:  You can define an image link by:
    1) creating an "image" subdirectory
    2) putting the images into this directory
    3) make [[./images/<image-file]] links in your Wiki
  The image directory gets replicated automagically by the publishing
  process and the links are created as IMG tags in the html.
  This is very practical.

  *However*: if you put an image in the same directory, make e file link
   to it [[./<image-file>]] it is nicely visible in Emacs, but the png
   file get's published as "<image-file>.html" (with a nice title and
   footer) and the link in the HTML file breaks.

- If you use several wiki directories in one project, and two Wiki pages
  have the same name, the first one is published, in the index page all
  ocurrencies of the name are listed.

Conclusion 1: don't do any of these things

Conclusion 2: implement a more sistematic aproach to directory
              treatment.

Proposal:

- A Wiki Project is a collection of files of different character and
  purpose, which are kept in one or more directories.

- Each directory has it's own properties, some of them come to mind immediatly:
    - publishing-directory
    - publishing-file-prefix: when not beginning with / or ~ relative to
                              the default publishing directory)
    - private_pages (regex)
    - publishing-markup: when this is set to nil, files should just be copied
    ...
    - plain-pages (regex): files matching this regular expresion are not
                           marked up, but just copied.
    - tag: used as default publishing-file-prefix, as subdirectory to
                           the default directory and to distinguish
                           Wiki links to different Wiki pages with the
                           same name

I hope that this approach would simplify publishing, as all information
required to publish a file is explicitly available, and need not be
deduced from other parameters or setup conditions.  It would also
resolve the name-ambiguity.

A default setup could be:

  (default
   (directory . "~/Wiki")
   (publishing-directory . "~/WebWiki"))

  (images
   (publishing-markup . nil))

Regards,

        Jorge-León