Drupal Learning Journal 6. “Using Drupal” – Chapter 5 – Wiki

Chapter 5 of Using Drupal was about creating a Wiki with Drupal. I don’t foresee right now that I would do that for any of my own sites, but you never know what a client might ask, so it’s good to know about it. The book’s authors’ assessment is that there was not a single complete wiki package at the time of writing, but it is possible to create a functioning wiki in drupal. As I can search the wiki related modules any time at Drupal.org, I will not bother right now assessing whether and how this situation changed by now. Instead, I will focus on other bits of useful information I gathered from this chapter.

• The Freelinking module implements a filter for the easier creation of HTML links to other pages in the site. (page 184) It doesn’t have a Drupal 7 version.
• To remove the author information display from wiki pages go to Administer->Site Building-Themese-Configure tab -> “Display post information” section -> Wiki page box. (page 187)
• I have been using Tokens, because they were required for modules I wanted, but didn’t read up on them so far. Page 195 explains well what a token is. Here is my paraphrasing. Tokens are placeholders, like [yyyy] is for four digit year. The Tokens module creates a central repository of them. Tokens provide functionality to other modules, invisible to users. The basic version of it is now part of Drupal 7, but not all, so it is getting further developed. In beta now.
• Link rot is that when you remove or change the URL of a page in your site and other sites are still pointing to it (and getting 404s). Two ways to fight rot. 1. creating an alias from the old address to the new, but Google may penalize you for this. 2. Use Path Redirect module, to create a proper redirection with Pathauto. This is the recommended method. (page 196) For Drupal 7 the module has been renamed to Redirect and right now has a beta version.
• The Diff module “allows pretty viewing of all added/changed/deleted words between revisions” of nodes. (page 201). Drupal 7 version is in beta.
• Additional useful wiki related modules are listed on page 207:
  – The PEAR Wiki Filter allows several kinds of markup syntaxes, between its version for Drupal 6 is in beta only.
  – The Table of Contents module “generates a list of select header tags in a box. The links point to the anchors so users can quickly access each section of your documents.” They are looking for co-maintainer for Drupal 7.
  – The Talk module “removes comments from the node page and puts them on a separate tab.” Drupal 7 version was pledged but not done yet.
  – The View’s module‘s Backlinks feature gives a list of all the other pages on the site that are referring to the page you are on. Views is in alpha for Drupal 7.