[Request] Aliases / redirects

[Jaap Karssenberg]

Implement a way to assign aliases to pages so we can open the same page by multiple names. From the user point of view this should work the same as a redirect in e.g. wikipedia.

The implementation should be that we store the aliases as properties of the page were they redirect. The cache should take care of keeping track of aliases in an efficient way. If a page of the same name as the alias already exists this page will take precedence, so only check aliases after checking for an existing page. Aliases follow the same semantics as normal links, so it should be possible to alias within the same namespace or to another namespace by relative or absolute page paths. In fact for all practical purposes aliases are a kind of special backlink from the alias to the target page.

[Jaap Karssenberg (jaap.karssenberg)]

Note: Make sure aliases are taken into account for auto-linking etc. see discussion in bug #601055

[Frank Uebel (fuebel)]

Hi. Just a question, what is the status of this idea? I've started with the other request, but that solution uses visible tags in the actual page, so it is less elegant than using alias "properties".

[Jaap Karssenberg (jaap.karssenberg)]

Status is that it is just a request, no actual code available.

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Frank Uebel <email address hidden> wrote:
> Hi. Just a question, what is the status of this idea? I've started with
> the other request, but that solution uses visible tags in the actual
> page, so it is less elegant than using alias "properties".
>
> --
> [Request] Aliases / redirects
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/288583
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

[Frank Uebel (fuebel)]

Thanks for the feedback. How would these aliases be stored? The pages already have a header with the page creation date, the file version and so on. Would it be possible to extend this metadata with custom lines, like "META Aliases pagename1, pagename2..." and "META Keywords word1, word2...wordN"? If a generic way to store meta information in a page would be accessible (including methods to retrieve them from index and store them back again), additional plugins could access this data. Currently, I am not so sure, how much that would be in the index class (and gui later), though.

[Jaap Karssenberg (jaap.karssenberg)]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 8:26 AM, Frank Uebel <email address hidden> wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback. How would these aliases be stored? The pages
> already have a header with the page creation date, the file version and
> so on. Would it be possible to extend this metadata with custom lines,
> like "META Aliases pagename1, pagename2..." and "META Keywords word1,
> word2...wordN"? If a generic way to store meta information in a page
> would be accessible (including methods to retrieve them from index and
> store them back again), additional plugins could access this data.
> Currently, I am not so sure, how much that would be in the index class
> (and gui later), though.

Something like this. Page properties (like aliases) could be stored in
the page header. Probable we should also implement a generic table in
the index to cache these properties for quick lookup.

One additional thing to think about is what to do when two pages
define the same alias.

-- Jaap