Hello, I have a plugin in mind, but before starting to write some code, I come to you to see if something similar already exists, or if there is an easier way to do it.

What I want

I want to be able to have several versions of the same page. For instance (this is not my usecase, but it matches exactly), let's say I am developping a software, with several versions published, and I want:

  • the latest documentation to be available at http://example.com/doc;
  • the documentation for previous (or current version, with permanent URL) available at http://example.com/doc/v2_0.

What I am thinking about is:

  • my wiki has the documentation written in pages doc/v1_0.mdwn, doc/v2_0.mdwn, and so on;
  • the doc.mdwn page contains nothing but code to copy metadata from the latest doc/*mdwn page, that is: meta information, tag, and ymlfront.

What I have in mind

What I have in mind is a plugin providing a directive pageversion such that the doc.mdwn page contains only:

[[!pageversion  pages="doc/* and !doc/*/*"]]

This would grab the latest documentation page, copy its content, and copy meta information, tags and fields.

How to do it

I see two ways to do it, but both have big drawbacks.

  • I could, in the preprocess function of the plugin, copy the interesting part of the %pagestate global variable. In pseudo-code, something like:

    $pagestate{doc}{meta} = $pagestate{doc/v2_0}{meta};
    $pagestate{doc}{fields} = $pagestate{doc/v2_0}{fields};
    $pagestate{doc}{tags} = $pagestate{doc/v2_0}{tags}; # This one definitely would not work, but it is pseudo-code
    

    I fear that some necessary side effects would not occur. For instance, setting date using the meta plugin sets the page creation time at a deeper level. Copying %pagestate would bypass this.

  • I could, in the preprocess function, call the preprocess function for those three plugins. But this would mean guessing what the original directive arguments were, which can be tricky.

My questions

  • Does something similar already exist?
  • Do you have any better idea about how to do it?