Sorry for the length of this, I'll be able to post more specific questions as I get farther along in getting up to speed on DW. If more knowledgeable readers see errors in my assumptions/statements posted here as "facts" I'd be very grateful for corrections, as well as responses to my explicit questions (if any 8-)
Background/context: I have a very large collection (many thousands) of text files of varying sizes, from individual "snippets" and "chunks", to organized "sections" and "chapters" of book-like texts in process. I'm looking at using AsciiDoc (light markup, still just plain text) as a "canonical archive" format for the more structured writing pieces, with a goal to automating conversion via DocBook XML to various publishing target formats (HTML Help, EPUB/mobi, LaTeX/PDF). But 95% of my content is in relatively small files, currently accessible only by navigating the filesystem and search (content vs filename).
Overall goal with DokuWiki DW's role in my evolving info management system is as a "transparent container" for these text files, to help me search/browse/tag/structure all the bit and pieces, as well as storing the larger documents as they evolve. I'd like to architect things so that in theory DW could just disappear, and my information would still remain useful and still be as organized by the directory tree as it is now, just adding the DW structuring features on top of that.
More specific problem
I frequently rename both the files and the directory structures containing them - let's call that "refactoring the data". However since the filenames seem to be DW's canonical "page name" for cross-links, and the directories implement DW's "namespace" feature, I am concerned by the many difficulties I see in the forums and mailing list with users' renaming files and folders.
I keep my whole dirtree under version control, and can include /conf and /meta as well if that helps me manage my DW the way I want. Therefore I don't care about DW's revision control feature, and am happy to just wipe /attic every time I refactor my data. I do of course want to keep as much as possible of DW's organizational features, particularly internal cross-referencing, tagging/indexing/ToC pages etc., so will be happy to limit myself to those features and plugins whose data structures will survive a full "reset/rebuild" if the meta data needs to be wiped.
Therefore I'd prefer to keep DW-specific markup within the "content itself" text to a minimum, ideally limiting the DW-organizing tags/index/cross-reference stuff to delimited header/footer areas above/below the "content itself", so I could relatively easily convert or even strip it out, leaving the remaining files as "content itself" only.
Or ideally, I could make use of those DW features and plugins that store their information in the DW meta directory structure, and that could somehow be kept in sync with the changes made when I refactor my data.
What I've looked at so far
- The EditX plugin
http://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:editx seems OK, perhaps more robust than
- OpenAs
http://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:openas
but neither fixes the backlinks
- the scripts here
http://www.dokuwiki.org/faq:howto-rename-pages and
- here
http://www.dokuwiki.org/backlinks
- also found this:
for f in $(find . -type f -name "*.txt"); do sed -i 's/\[\[namespace1:namespace_old /\[\[namespace1:namespace-new:/g' $f; done
in a forum post, may work well, but I'll need to climb a bit further up the sed scripting curve to fully understand what's going on there before I use such tools in production.
- I also found this tool
https://studio.plugins.atlassian.com/wiki/display/UWC/RefactorDW but that looks like it might be quite involved, and I'd hate to be dependent on a tool so "outside" the community; it may only work with a given DW version and then not be updated.
Actual questions 8-)
Unfortunately I haven't explored any one path enough to have specific questions yet, looking at this point for more general recommendations as to which way to head to accomplish what I want, which is essentially
A to establish methods of structuring and cross-linking my files so that I can relatively easily refactor my data files and then rebuild DW's meta information, or
B to be able to refactor page/filenames and directories/namespaces within DW-aware tools that will automatically keep its meta information in sync
From my limited browsing and googling so far, it seems the latter B approach isn't possible, which is why I'm focusing on the former A approach. If anyone can point to step-by-step procedures and/or recommend one or more relatively robust and currently-maintained plugins it would be greatly appreciated.
Oh and C is it possible to disable DW's revision control feature?
Thanks for your patience if you've gotten all the way through this, and of course in advance for any responses.