----- Original Message ----- From: "Earle Martin" openguides@downlode.org To: openguides-dev@openguides.org Sent: 22 June 2004 23:44 Subject: [OpenGuides-Dev] Muddled syntax
I just overheard this on IRC:
23:31 < osfameron> gah, I forget the @REDIRECT syntax... 23:32 < osfameron> Aha #REDIRECT (not to be confused with @INDEX_LINK) 23:33 <@Dom> yeah, that is confusing.
Maybe we should phase in #INDEX_LINK (or @REDIRECT) in parallel before dropping one of the variant forms. What do people think?
Bear it in mind that @INDEX_LINK is a construct that will expand to a list of pages in the category/locale at some future date (expand in the sense of expand in-line in the HTML, rather than providing a link that runs a query).
I guess that '@' is a foible of us Perl hackers, that we know means an array. But I think that the future might involve using template language (TT2) in the body of pages instead.
On the other hand, #REDIRECT is syntax stolen^Wborrowed from UseMod.
In my opinion, #REDIRECT is a kludge which we can do better without. Redirection should be handled in page metadata, which allows us to put in place temporary redirects (for showing Christmas trees on the home page for example, without interfering with the contents of the page).
This also allows us to think ahead to future functionality, such as conditional redirects. Doing this in metadata also allows us to use the redirects the other way round, by way of showing all pages that redirect into this page, as template variables when rendering the page.
My $0.02