diff options
| -rw-r--r-- | doc/todo/recentchanges.mdwn | 57 |
1 files changed, 57 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/todo/recentchanges.mdwn b/doc/todo/recentchanges.mdwn index d46c0d9a8..bdd7948e4 100644 --- a/doc/todo/recentchanges.mdwn +++ b/doc/todo/recentchanges.mdwn @@ -86,3 +86,60 @@ your pages. --Ethan > backend. > > -- CharlesMauch + +---- + +Here's a full design for redoing recentchanges, based on Ethan's ideas: + +* Add a recentchanges plugin that has a preprocessor directive: + \[[recentchanges num=100 pages=* template=recentchanges.tmpl]] + If put on the [[recentchanges]] page, this would result in up to 100 + recentchanges/change_$id.mdwn files being created. +* Which means the plugin has to store state and use a checkconfig hook + or the like to create the requested pages (and delete old ones) when + the wiki is rebuilt and when the post_commit hook is run. +* Then it's a simple matter of using inline on the recentchanges page + to display the changes. (With a special template to display nicely.) +* Rss/atom comes for free.. +* So drop mail notifications. +* If someone wants to subscribe to notifications for only a subset + of pages, they can either filter the recentchanges in their rss + aggregator, or they can set up their own page that uses the recentchanges + directive for only the pages they want. +* The `rcs_notify` functions will be removed. +* `rcs_getchange` is passed a change id (as returned from rcs_recentchanges) + and a partially filled out HTML::Template and fills out the remainer of the + template. So if a template is used that includes diffs, it will need to run + some expensive diffing operation, wikis with less resources can use a + template that doesn't include diffs and avoid that overhead. +* So to update the changes files, just call `rcs_recentchanges`, create + files for each new id, and delete files for each id that is no longer + included. +* The cgi support for recentchanges can be dropped, or moved to a different + plugin. + +I'm unsure how fast this will all be, but by using regular pages, there's +cacheing, at least. The main slowdown might turn out to be the inlining and +not the generation of the changes pages. The current cgi recentchanges +code saves a tenth of a second or so by memoizing htmllink, an optimisation +that won't be available when using the more general inlining code. + +An obvious optimisation, and one implied by this design, is that each change +file is only written once. This assumes that the data in them doesn't ever +change, which actually isn't true (svn commit messages can be changed), but +is probably close enough to true for our purposes. + +Another optimisation would be to htmlize the change files when they're +written out -- avoids re-rendering a given file each time a new change is +made (thus doing 1/100th the work). + +Links in the change files to the changed pages will need special handling. +These links should not generate backlinks. They probably shouldn't be +implemented as wikiliks at all. Instead, they should be raw, absolute +html links to the pages that were changed. + +Only problem with this approach is that the links break if the changed +page later gets deleted. I think that's acceptable. It could link to +`ikiwiki.cgi?do=redir&page=foo`, but that's probably overkill. + +--[[Joey]] |