The Wiki Trails feature allows wiki authors to create "trails" through sequences of pages in the wiki. You simply specify pages and their order on a "trail index", and then place the navigation markup on the pages that you will be navigating.
(Don't confuse the pagelist directive with Wiki Trails - they are different animals as explained in the Q and A below.)
Pm Wiki defines 2 trail markups, specifying a trail index link:
Stryck Wiki<<|[[Trail Index Page]]|>> displays as "<< PreviousPage | Trail Index Page | NextPage >>".
<|[[Trail Index Page]]|> displays as "< PreviousPage | Trail Index Page | NextPage >", except the appropriate arrow is omitted at the beginning and end of the trail.
and for a trail path:
^|[[TrailIndexPage]]|^
Markup is most often added to a group header or group footer.
The trail index page link has the same markup as a standard link, this means for example you can specify:
<|[[TrailIndexPage | +]]|>
<<|[[TrailIndexPage | A description]]|>>
Trail index page links can be restricted by anchors (links to a specific location within a page), this means you can have more than one trail on a page, or start a trail from a specific location in a page.
<|[[Trail Index Page(#trailstart#trailend)]]|>
Before you can use a trail through a set of pages, you have to create a "trail index" on a separate page, which we will call the "trail index page". On that trail index page, you simply create a numbered, bulleted, or definition list of links. (So every numbered or bulleted list of links implicitly creates a trail.)
It is important that each page name (link) be the first item following each bullet; any text or formatting in front of the page name link will exclude it from the trail.
If you want to style your trail index, you can include a CSS.
An example trail index page might be the following list:
The list above creates the following "wikitrail", displayed using a pagelist:
(:pagelist trail={$FullName}#trailstart#trailend fmt={$FullName}#traillist:)
|
What makes a trail "work" is adding trail markup on the pages in the trail (i.e. the pages that are listed in the bullet/numbered list on the trail index page).
To build a trail, add trail markup like <<|[[TrailIndexPage]]|>> to a page, where TrailIndexPage is the page, described above, containing the bulleted list of pages in the trail. Pm Wiki will display the trail markup with links to any previous and next pages in the trail.
The trail markup can be placed anywhere in a group header or footer, or on a page. A page can contain multiple trail markups. If you are adding a trail to every page in a group, consider setting the trail markup in the Group Header or Group Footer pages instead of on every individual page in your group.
^|[[TrailIndexPage]]|^ treats the list levels as a hierarchy and displays the "path" to reach the current page (i.e., a "breadcrumb" trail).
In the example trail above, the markup ^|TrailIndexPage|^ on TrailPage4 would display "TrailIndexPage | TrailPage2 | TrailPage4".
Wiki administrators can change the trail separator of the "path" trail ( ^|[[TrailIndexPage]]|^ ) from the default | by setting the variable $TrailPathSep in the config.php file. For instance $TrailPathSep = ' > '; will output "TrailIndexPage > TrailPage2 > TrailPage4".
Typically, a trail is a linear list with a first and a last page. However, the trail can be made "circular" by repeating the first page as the last item in the trail index:
* [[TrailPage1]] * [[TrailPage2]] ... * [[TrailPageN]] * [[TrailPage1]]
If the trail index page is intended to be read by others, the last item can be made invisible inside an (:if false:) block:
* [[TrailPage1]] * [[TrailPage2]] ... * [[TrailPageN]] (:if false:) * [[TrailPage1]] (:ifend:)
Before version 2.2.1, if your trail contains pages in different groups, it should use full [[Group.Name]] links instead of just [[Name]].
<| and [[link]] and |>; same for the other trail markups.
Pm Wiki encapsulates the trail with a wikitrail css class.
This allows the wiki trail to be customised by defining CSS for the wikitrail in the local.css file.
Trails from a single page can only be displayed using the pagelist trail parameter. For example
(:pagelist trail=PmWiki/WikiTrails#trailstart fmt=PmWiki.WikiTrails#traillist order=random,$Name count=3:) |
1) On the Trail Index Page?:
* [[MyTrailPage1]] * [[MyTrailPage2]] * [[MyTrailPage3]]
2) On the pages My Trail Page 1?, 2, and 3:
<<|[[TrailIndexPage]]|>>
What's the difference between a PageList and a Wiki Trail??
The pagelist directive dynamically generates a list of pages. There are many ways to generate the list, including using a Wiki Trail? as the source.
The pagelist directive then displays the pages that match the criteria using an optional template - for example displaying each page name on a separate line as a link or including the entire content.
The pagelist directive currently does not have built-in navigation markup that you can put on the pages in the list.
By contrast, Wiki Trails are simply specified via links on an "index" page and you can put previous-next navigation markup on each page. The two serve very different purposes. Wiki Trails are useful for specifying the pages in web feeds, for creating a "tour" through a predefined set of pages, and many other things.
This page may have a more recent version on pmwiki.org: PmWiki:WikiTrails, and a talk page: PmWiki:WikiTrails-Talk.