Feature Request External label resolution

[Milian Wolff]

Am Sonntag, 20. April 2008 schrieb Sherwood Botsford:

> Milian Wolff wrote:

> > Am Sonntag, 20. April 2008 schrieb Sherwood Botsford:

> >> So perhaps I should ask a more general question:

> >

> > You build your whole page with Markdown? No underlaying CMS or similar?

> > Especially if you consider that many links you really should think about

> > installing a CMS.

> >

> >> How do you deal with large numbers of links?

> >

> > I use Drupal and write the contents in Markdown. But Navigation, related

> > Links, Tags etc. are generated by Drupal - no Markdown there. The basic

> > templates don't use Markdown either.

>

> Currently I use template toolkit.  Markdown is used as a filter

> with tt2.

>

> The navigation is handled in two stages:

>

> 1.  A script called file_index runs find on my template

> directory.  It then reads in a file of sequence overrides.

> (The default is alphabetical order, which is fine for 90%

> of the files.  The overrides allow me to change this, or to

> mark regexes to be ignored.

>

> At the end of this, I have an index file of all pages that

> are to have menu items that is sorted in

> the order that menu items should appear.

>

> 2.  A template include does the actual menu build, whatever

> parts of the menu show for that page in the order they are

> in for that page. The menu at any given time shows the current

> page/folder and it's parents as being open, but all other

> folders are pruned.  Net result:  Even though there are a hundred

> plus pages in the site, the menu never shows more than about

> 15-20 items, and the present location is always indicated

> in a different color.  So menu is also my breadcrumb trail.

> (My pet peeve is sites where you chase links in circles.)

>

>

> Index files for each directory are of the form

>

> /Foo/Bar/Bar.html  That is, Directory Bar has a file Bar.html.

>

> This has some advantages for the site growing.

>

> E.g.  Initially I have Trees/Poplars.html

>

> When I get enough time to write the individual pages for the

> 5 kinds of poplars, this becomes

>

> Trees/Poplars/Poplars.html

> Trees/Poplars/Balsam_Poplar.html

> Trees/...

>

> Rerun file_index, rerun Ttree, and the links work.

>

> I really like markdown, because it doesn't get much in my

> way.  I want to keep markdown. Typically for me to create another

> page requires about 2 minutes plus the time to actually write the

> page.


This is a very interesting way of creating a website. Drupal and other CMS 
utilize PHP or other programming languages to keep things customizable and 
dynamic. Of course this requires a webserver with support for PHP or similar, 
most often a database like MySQL and so forth.

Since you already have a working system with your setup you should do what 
takes the least amount of work. And this would be:


> I may end up hacking markdown and disabling the link resolution

> mechanism, and create my own link resolution system as another

> ttree filter. Or hacking markdown to do a db lookup instead of

> a linear search through the file.


Yes that seems to be a good idea. Though I recon you could pick one of the 
Markdown implementations with support for extensions or one which is object 
orientated so you could simply overload the basic link resolution. Should be 
cleaner than hacking Markdown.pl


> So Markdown at present only sees the links that are in my content

> pages.  And so right now there are only a dozen or so.  But

> as my site grows, the importance of jumping from page to page

> via internal references will increase dramatically.

>

> I'll take a look at Drupal.


It's learning curve might be a bit steep though I think it is worth it. Maybe 
try it out for your next website.


-- 
Milian Wolff
http://milianw.de
OpenPGP key: CD1D1393
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/attachments/20080420/c01c02c2/attachment.pgp>