The Pike Site directory structure aims for a trade-off between ease of
access (low depth), few directories per level, short and to-the-point file
and directory names while keeping an intuitive overall structure where each
section has a clear purpose. That said, these are all fine goals, but since
they are mostly subjective properties, they might be sidestepped from time
to time, and not everybody will agree about how well we have succeeded.
The exact purpose of each section of the site is not a topic that will
be covered here; the prime source of such information is, in order - page
metadata descriptions (for those index.xml files that have them), bringing
up the question in the LysKOM (kom.lysator.liu.se) conference
pike.ida.liu.se if you have a LysKOM presence, or asking me
(Johan Sundström) directly, by
for instance. In the future,
a Site Map will be made to help both users and editors alike find their way
around the site with greater ease, but for now we have to stick to what we
already have in place.
The site language is US English, both for file/directory names
and page content.
Keep directory names short, lower case, alphanumeric US ASCII,
possibly with underscores or minus characters to separate words (do not
use space for separation). When you can come up with a decent single
word name, that is typically preferred, though.
Keep file/directory names equal to page titles. A page titled
"Programme" should be named "programme", not "program" or something else.
If it is a file, add an appropriate extension - ".xml" for most content
files.
For the rare cases where this is side-stepped (like the Pike Site project
which was called "site" for short), an URL redirect from the full name
should exist. Please avoid linking to redirected pages, unless there are
good reasons for doing so.
Create directories only for pages planned or likely to get subpages.
To get a polished "quotable" URL for some page, create a regular page just
as above and either add a redirect rule yourself, or ask a site maintainer
to help you.
Avoid moving/renaming pages. For those rare occasions when a move
is a good thing, set up URL redirects for the old pages, so people don't
get 404s. Ask a maintainer if you don't know how to do this yourself.
Put an index.xml file in every directory with contents. This is
the page that is shown when visiting /path/to/your/directory/ and the
(metadata) title of this page is also what will be shown in the top line
of the navigation for files in the directory and its subdirectories. In
the parent directory, this title will also show up in the lower line of
the navigation, once you have added a "dirname/" line in its sub.menu.
