An alias directive could work like an inverse redirect, but in a more
maintainable way. Currently, a page might have several redirects leading to it,
without an easy way of enumerating them. Therefore, the following directive is
suggested for addition (possibly by means of a plugin):
The alias and aliastext directives implicitly create
redirect pages to the page they are used on. If two or more pages claim a
non-existing page to be an alias, a disambiguation page will automatically
generated. If an existing page is claimed as an alias, it will be prefixed
with a note that its topic is also an alias for other pages.
All aliases to a page are automatically listed below the backlink and tag
lists at the bottom of a page by default. This can be configured globally by
setting the alias_list configuration option to false, or set explicitly
per alias by specifying list=true or list=false.
Similar to the taglink directive, aliastext produces the alias name as
well as registering it.
Usage example
Greece.mdwn:
Greece, also known as \[[!aliastext Hellas]] and officially the
\[[!aliastext "Hellenic Republic"]], is a …
<!-- there are so many people who misspell this, let's create a redirect -->
\[[!alias Grece list=false]]
This page by itself will redirect from the "Hellas", "Hellenic Republic" and
"Grece" pages as if they both contained just:
\[[!meta redir="Greece"]]
If, on the other hand, Hellas Planitia also claims [[!alias Hellas]], the
Hellas page will look like this:
**Hellas** is an alias for the following pages:
* \[[Greece]]
* \[[Hellas Planitia]]
The proposed plugin/directive could be extended, eg. by also including
old-style redirects in the alias list, but that might introduce unwanted
coupling with the meta directive.
On second thought, implementing this might have similarities with
[[todo/auto-create tag pages according to a template]] -- the auto-created
pages would, if the way of the alias directive is followed, not create physical
files, though, but be created just when someone edits them.
If multiple plugins do such a trick, they would have to fight over who comes
first. If, for example, we have a setup where not yet created tag pages are
automatically generated as "[[!inline pages="link(<TMPL_VAR TAG>)"
archive="yes"]]" and aliases are enabled, and a non-tag pages grabs a tag as an
alias (as to redirect all taglinks of the tag to itself), there are two
possibilities:
- The autotag plugin comes first:
- autotag sees the missing tag and creates its "[[!inline" stuff
- alias sees that there is already content and adds its prefix
- The alias plugin comes first (this is the prefered way):
- alias sees the empty page, sees it is not contested by other alias
directives and creates its "[[!meta" redirect
- autotag sees there is already content and doesn't do anything
That issue could be handled with "priority number" on the hook, with plugins
with a lower number being called first.
[[!tag wishlist]]
