Differentiate between links to existing and nonexisting pages (and some other stuff)

[Almeus]

Like this project. Wish I could help but I'm not a developer. I've been trying a bunch of wikis lately and this one seems like it has potential. Mediawiki is too complex. Gollum isn't complex enough. Dokuwiki is ugly and requires a bunch of plugins to be useful. Bookstack almost isn't a wiki (you can't create new pages by linking from other pages). Wiki.js and Pepperminty wiki are abandoned. Tiddlywiki has a weird workflow thanks to it being a single HTML file.

Here are some ideas that I think might improve things.

1. visually differentiate between links to existing pages and nonexistent pages (such as by color or style).
2. page tags. I see the parser already recognizes YAML frontmatter. I don't expect anything on the level of Obsidian's bases feature, but a way to categorize pages in a non-hierarchical way would be cool.
3. adapt the index feature to the above two, with a way to list wanted pages (links to nonexistent pages along with the number of links to that page) and a way to list pages by tag.
4. backlinks (aka bidirectional links), have a way to see the pages that link to the page you're on.

Some of this may be scope creep, but I think number 1 (along with the ability to follow the link to create the page which Otter already does) is the feature that differentiates a wiki from a documentation system or CMS.

[redimp]

Hey @Almeus, thank you for sharing your thoughts. Every point you listed is a valid request!

Some background info: Currently we are moving with the engine towards plugins, so that features can be added that are not (yet) in the core of the wiki. This enables users to add the features they want without overloading the core functionality.

Back to your suggestions:

(1) visually differentiate [..] nonexistent pages: This is already available via docs/plugin_examples/plugin_redlinks

(2) Call it "tags" or "categories": I can see that this is useful and a valid way for organizing the content of a wiki. Will think about it.

(3) In Settings > Housekeeping you can find a tool called Broken WikiLinks that analyses the content of the wiki and lists all missing pages and where they are referenced.

(4) "backlinks" are available via docs/plugin_examples/plugin_referencingpages

[Almeus]

I tried both the plugins you mentioned. They satisfy my suggestions for the most part.

There seems to be a bug with the redlinks plugin. If you create a link to a nonexistent page that must first be sanitized, such as [[Hello!]], then follow the link to create the page, the original link will remain red until you change the link text to match the sanitized file name.

[redimp]

Hey Almeus, thanks for reporting the success and the issue you ran into.

Unfortunately this is the expected behavior. Options to solve this would be:

• (1) Creating a page updates the page where the link came from.
• (2) Make the [[Wikilink]] sanitize what it is linking to.

Both options don't really "feel right" to me. Maybe @deseven has an idea?

[deseven]

I don't think we should do anything with the user input here, user could input something that couldn't be used as a page name at all, like [[!!!!!]], what are we supposed to do with that? I think this should be approached from another side: instead of silently fixing user input, the edit page should return an error "The page with this name could not be created" or something like that.