wiki namespace support like the one in dokuwiki

[trac.ticket@…]

It would be very great to have wiki namespace support, for sorting wiki pages and protect user to build too big pages. I think it's very important to support wiki namespaces.

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As the topic is broad, it's worth to discuss it in a specific proposal page, see TracDev/Proposals/WikiNamespaces.

[Christian Boos]

We already support scoped WikiPageNames, but I guess we could improve a bit the readability of those names.

If we're in a page belonging to a given "namespace", that leading prefix could be omitted when displaying references to other pages sharing the same namespace.

E.g. in the page TracDev/DatabaseSchema a reference to TracDev/DatabaseUpgrades would read DatabaseUpgrades (it would still have to be written in full, though).

This would be useful if we move all Trac documentation pages in TracGuide/<something> or TracHelp/<something>, as it's sometimes requested.

[christian.aust@…]

I'd like to vote for this, too. Having proper namespace support would indeed help to clean up some wiki issues. Real namespaces would also allow to narrow a search down to certain sets of pages, which is nice if you share one instance of trac for different projects.

I'd like to see this in future versions. Just my $.02.

[anonymous]

what is the difference between this "subwikis" like TracDev/… and a namespace?

you mean to extend search to just search "TracDev" and nothing else?

[Christian Boos]

The ...:WikiPageName syntax is already used for InterWiki and InterTrac links. It's not impossible that in the future, when there's support for Multiple Projects (#130), the use of InterTrac prefixes to specify some other projects will actually achieve a result quite close to what was requested here.

But for now, Trac support scopes by the way of scoped WikiPageNames (CamelCase words separated by "/"). The support for this can certainly be enhanced (see #4507). Introducing a different syntax (the DokuWiki one) would not bring any advantage over this, and, as explained before, will conflict with Inter(Wiki/Trac) links.

[Christian Boos]

Reconsidering comment:4:

The ...:WikiPageName syntax is already used for InterWiki and InterTrac links. It's not impossible that in the future, when there's support for Multiple Projects (#130), the use of InterTrac prefixes to specify some other projects will actually achieve a result quite close to what was requested here. … Introducing a different syntax (the DokuWiki one) would not bring any advantage over this, and, as explained before, will conflict with Inter(Wiki/Trac) links.

The advantage of namespaces over the hierarchy would be the possibility to assign a special semantic to set of pages, a kind of specialization of wiki pages. For example Help: for Trac's own help pages (#3386), Template: (for ​transclusion support a la MediaWiki), Category: for tagging, Special: for special pages like BadContent, TitleIndex, InterMapTxt, …

The hierarchy is there to structure the content in the main namespace (wiki:), like here TracDev/… CookBook/… and the namespaces could be used for segregating special wiki pages which are not to be considered part of the content.