some suggestions/questions and a patch

Hi All

(I also send this to Oliver today, but thought I'd say "hi" here also...)

I was looking for a nice, fast wiki and found awki. Very, very nice! For
the purpose of my current project I really like the simplicity of awki,
much harder to get lost in than say moin...

But there are a few things that I can't figure out how to do. And if
these things are not implemented I'm hoping you could find the time to
add them to awki:

1) How do I delete/rename pages from the webinterface (I know I could do
it directly on the server)?

2) It seems it's not possible to have danish letters æ (ae), ø (o-slash)
and å (a-circle) in WikiNames. Is that a limitation of awki, or is the
problem maybe somewhere else (ie my apache setup)?

3) I'd like to be able to make a list of certain pages (in this case I
have a number of pages each containing a song, so I'd like to make a
SongList), that doesn't require manual maintainence. I looked at the
FullSearch and figured out a way that works, but has some quirks. Hers
what I do:
a) Each song contains some unique search-sting like "INDEX",
b) The FrontPage has a link:
"http://localhost/cgi-bin/awki.cgi/FullSearch?string=INDEX".
Here are the quirks:
a) The word INDEX shows up in all songs, which doesn't look too good.
Could be solved by allowing "comments", for instance lines starting with
"#" are not displayed, but still searched.
b) the FrontPage is of course also listed since it also contains the
search string. Could be solved by having another parameter "exclude"
(excluding all pages that contain that word) so the link could be:
"...FullSearch?string=INDEX&exclude=FrontPage". Of cource some way of
passing a list to both "string" and "exclude" would add flexibility.
c) The link from the FrontPage is not very descriptive. Could be solved
by allowing links to have a description, like htmls <a
href=link>description</a>.

4) Some kind of templates could be nice, for instance with a select list 
that chooses from each of the pages starting with "Template".

5) Is there another way to get linebreaks than either using preformatted
text or paragraphs? The best way IMHO would be to convert one newline to
<br> and two or more newlines to <p>. This makes sense to me, but i
realize that this is going to affect the way peoples pages display...

I managed to hack 3a) (lines starting with # are not displayed) and 5)
(single newlines gets converted to <br>) in parser.awk, see attached patch.

I hope you don't mind me mailing these thoughts to you...

NB: I am a part time programmer (mainly php, python and simple bash), so
if you accept patches I would be willing to study awk (never looked at
it before) and see if I could figure out some more of the above
suggestions myself, although it doesn't seem that simple...

-- 
peace, love & harmony
Atte

http://www.atte.dk

*** parser-org.awk	Wed Nov  3 13:59:06 2004
--- parser.awk	Wed Nov  3 13:59:06 2004
***************
*** 57,63 ****
  	# return tmpline to $0 and remove last OFS (whitespace)
  	$0 = substr(tmpline, 1, length(tmpline)-1)
  }
! 
  
  # remove six single quotes (Wiki''''''Links)
  { gsub(/''''''/,""); }
--- 57,64 ----
  	# return tmpline to $0 and remove last OFS (whitespace)
  	$0 = substr(tmpline, 1, length(tmpline)-1)
  }
! # lines beginning with # are comments and not printed
! /^#/ {  next; }
  
  # remove six single quotes (Wiki''''''Links)
  { gsub(/''''''/,""); }
***************
*** 102,108 ****
  	}
  
  	#print line
! 	print;
  
  }
  
--- 103,110 ----
  	}
  
  	#print line
! #	print;
! 	print $0 "\n<br>\n";
  
  }