Short description
Renaming of Wikipages should be avoided. Nevertheless, this also happens sometimes. This action is often executed by inexperienced user, with the result, that a lot of broken links in the wiki occur, i.e. links on wikipages which link to page's old name do not work anymore. That could mess your whole wiki, when renaming is used often.
See for that discussion also FeatureRequests/RenamePageUpdatesLinkedPages
I would like to see following behaviour to avoid this problem: the old name of the wikipage should not be deleted. Calling the wikipage by the old name, should allow to access the old wikipage and it revision history up to point of renaming. When you call the old page, one should get a messagebox like this "The page was renamed on [date/time] to [newname]. For newer versions see [NewPageName]. Clear Message."
In the wikiinst/data/pages-dir, we might change only the directory names. For example:
And create a new directory for the renamed page, with the name "NewName%OldName" and copy the whole revisionsstuff from "%OldName%NewName" to "NewName%OldName".
Now when parsing through all existing wikipages and e.g. creating a list of all existing pages, all pages starting with "%" are ignored. Officially, these pages do not exist any more. The page "NewName" is listed only as NewName, "%OldName" tells the parser only, that this is a renamed page and that we can find the old page under the name "OldPage". But maybe we could also drop this. Maybe it just enough to name the new diretory only "NewName". The complete history of the old page still exist in the history of "NewName". Drawback of this solution: it wastes diskspace.
These are just ideas I would like to discuss with you. But renaming pages frequently could mess your wiki totally. Maybe this is a solution to prevent the wiki from getting totaly unuseable.
Deleting a page also doesn't have a "brute-force" implementation. The directories of deleted pages do still exist on the drive, only the pagename is deleted from "ListOfAllPages". I think we should implement a softer mechanism of renaming pages. This would make the wiki more fault-tolerant. -- OliverSiemoneit 2006-08-11 21:18:30
Annotation: When a user tries later to create a page with "OldName" that shouldn't be a problem. Before creating a new page we should check on "%OldName". If it exist, we just display a warning on link problems and throw the directory "%OldName" away than. The compelte history of the renaming process is included in NewName anyway. Or do I make some mistake with that... -- OliverSiemoneit 2006-08-11 21:18:30