O, Brother Where Art Thou?

Summary: pages not working correctly
Created: 2011-10-11 16:45
Status: Closed, not a bug
Category: Bug
Assigned:
Priority: 5
Version: 2.2.30
OS: winxp/7/mac

Description: I am taking a class that is using pmwiki as it's primary means of communication ( all papers are posted on it, ect). We now have 4 people who are known to have issues getting the wiki to accept pages with their names. When we try to post a new page under a new topic it defaults to either being an orphan page that no one can see OR it goes to the first page we created under the first topic we created and posts there. For instance if the first topic page we had was

O, Brother Where Art Thou? and my name there is

Andi Andrzejewski

Then I can not create a page on the

Papers On Roots Music And Technology page that is also called

Andi Andrzejewski I have to modify it with an underscore in order for it to have a separate page. But this is only a temporary solution because I can not have the same modification twice. For the next page I needed to make I had to reverse the order of my name and so forth.

  Is there a way to fix this issue? thanks

This is not a bug, but just the way PmWiki works.

1. In PmWiki, page names cannot include certain characters, such as "?". You can, however, put (:title:O, Brother Where Art Thou?:) on the page, and the page title that you wanted will display instead of the page name.

2. PmWiki by default uses the operating system's file system to store pages: each page is a separate file. Each page's name has two components: its "group" and its "name". This page for example is named 01268 and it resides within the page group PITS. If you looked at the Operating System's directory listing, this page would appear with the name PITS.01268. PmWiki calls that the page's "FullName". Thus, there cannot be two pages with the same name within the same page group.

If you don't specify the page group, the current group is assumed.

There are two ways around this, if you want two pages to appear to have the same name: (a) You can set their titles to be identical, since title information is stored in the file itself and thus does not have to be unique. (b) You can set two pages to the same page name as long as they belong to different page groups. Thus Profiles.MyName and Preferences.MyName can co-exist, because within the Operating System each has a unique filename. From PmWiki's perspective, the two pages have different a "FullName", but the same "Name": MyName.