Wiki like autolinks when posting - for easy crossreferencing

[rseidl]

Just wondering whether anybody has come across something like what the various Wikis allow for markup - they see a certain pattern in the posted text and automatically make a link. Either to another card/page in the same Wiki web or to other webs. (My request here is limited to forum internal links)

It allows very densely cross-connected webs or encyclopaedic webs. I would like to be able to do this, and it has become somewhat easier with vb3 and its

See also [post=id]this other post[/post]

tag. But you still have to do quite a few clicks and open pages to find what id you need for the cross reference. And anyway, ids are not user friendly. Words are.

The Wiki way allows markup of the cross links right inside the posting text, without leaving the posting page or opening other windows.

Some use a very generic "if a word has a starting capital and internal capital(s)" then it must be a link heuristic - also called CamelCase:
eg. Shell wouldnt be marked up but ShellOil would be.

Some use slightly more explicit patterns such as [[Shell]] around the to-be-linked words.

Anyway, so far so similar to our vbCodes. Now here is the trick part: the Wiki software will automatically find the right other place to link to and apply the link. In vb Terminology it would be a thread with the title the same as the found tag, eg Shell in the example above.

The second trick part is if the Shell thread did not exist yet, the Wiki makes a new one.
In vb terms, I think you would want the posting code to come back to the user with a list of to-be-created links and for each:
+ menu popup in which forum to create the thread and -uhm-
+ whether to create it all checkbox (perhaps you misspelled a name and it couldnt find the exact thread title).

Has anybody done something like this for vBulletin ?


It would be something like a

See also [xref]Shell[/xref]

tag. The posting php would have to be extended to look for these and match them up with any threadstarter titles. If found, apply the link, perhaps rewriting as

See also [xref=2883]Shell[/xref] or the existing vb3 [post=2883}Shell[/post}

Note how it added the id. If the title is not found, it could display similar threads titles (in case of minor misspellings) and the abovementioned forum popup and create checkbox.

-- sorry this got longer than I thought. Hope it makes sense. Thanks for any advice !


See also:
Wiki CamelCase - ConcatenatedCapitalizedWordsMakeALinkSyntax
TravelWiki editing / link markup (this particular one uses [[tag]])
other links, namespaces syntax etc. from Wikipedia (scroll down halfway)