New directory structure for WIki pages

New directory structure for WIki pages
by atarimike on 2008-11-05 (#39618)

I've changed the page structure for the wiki to be a little cleaner.

Instead of pages being at nesdevwiki.org/index.php/Foo, they will be at nesdevwiki.org/wiki/Foo. This matches the Wikipedia structure, and will be a little nicer to link or type.

I left a redirect for the old structure, so existing links should still work. Let me know if you find anything broken, or find some old links that don't work anymore.

by blargg on 2008-11-06 (#39642)

Any reason it can't be nesdevwiki.org/Foo ? I always wonder why so many Wikis have seemingly unnecessary cruft between the domain name and the page name (/wiki/ is admittedly minimal).

by atari2600a on 2008-11-06 (#39643)

if /foo/ NEEDS to exist, then I say /wiki/ should reside within it. Typing /wiki/foo/ really seems weird to me...

by blargg on 2008-11-06 (#39651)

Huh? Maybe I was unclear, sorry. Instead of http://nesdevwiki.org/wiki/NES_CPU , why not just http://nesdevwiki.org/NES_CPU ? I don't do websites, so maybe there's some technical reason why the latter isn't practical. In my naive view, the mapping of a URL is entirely up to the web server, rather than having to directly correspond with any file structure or whatever, so in a sense it's like an API.

by atarimike on 2008-11-06 (#39666)

blargg wrote:
Any reason it can't be nesdevwiki.org/Foo ? I always wonder why so many Wikis have seemingly unnecessary cruft between the domain name and the page name (/wiki/ is admittedly minimal).

The /wiki is actually there for a reason.

/wiki/Foo doesn't exist on the server. All the wiki files live in /w/ and the main script is /w/index.php. The webserver rewrites the request to the actual page, which for /wiki/Foo is /w/index.php?title=Foo.

The issue with doing a redirect on the top level directory is you have to exclude a lot of files you don't want turned into wiki pages, like robots.txt or favicon.ico, and can run into weird problems if article titles clash with real file. By using a specific directory, you can rewrite everything.