I'd like to see a feature where you can define aliases to point to specific pages so that (say) writing 'vim' or vim generates a link to VimEditor that looks like vim, IE5 and IE6 link to InternetExplorer, Mozilla to MozillaBrowser, and so on. This would be particularly useful for references to specific technologies when writing a page.

The reason for this is that many TWiki newcomers don't write pages with many links, perhaps because they aren't aware of the topic names.

Ideally you would define the aliases on the target page, but if necessary they could be done on a central page, a bit like InterwikiPlugin.

Another way to do this would be as part of the AutomaticLinkSuggestionPlugin, generating links that look like vim.

-- RichardDonkin - 22 Apr 2002

Potentially sounds pretty good, but I'd worried they'd be a real mess if this was done at render time, so auto link suggestion sounds a lot better to me.

-- JohnTalintyre - 22 Apr 2002

MoinMoin has a feature like this. If the first line of a page is %REDIRECT topicname%, then the user is transparently forwarded to the referenced page and the page as a "redirected from xxxx" note at the top.

-- DavidLeBlanc - 22 Apr 2002

My first thought was also redirect, but whilst I think this may be a useful feature, I'm not so sure it's well suited to many alias entries.

-- JohnTalintyre - 22 Apr 2002

I just spent probably 2 hours looking for this feature, and it looks like the InterwikiPlugin that is included in the current release should solve many of my problems. My only request is that this is more easily included in the mainline documentation using the Alias terminology.

-- RaymondLutz - 29 Sep 2003

Might I suggest that this 'Alias' feature be more generic, allowing for aliases to anything for example:

• Emacs -> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html
• Testing -> InterWiki:Testing
• Alias -> TopicAlias

-- PaulPetterson - 30 Sep 2003

It looks like TopicVarsPlugin may be a match for many uses for this sort of thing. The variables are global to the Web, and they are not local to the given topic. Thus you could do this:

• Set Emacs = http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html

and then refer to it as %Emacs%.

What you can't do is declare a variable and have it only active during the instantiation of a given INCLUDE file, for example. And multiple definitions of the same variable will result in the last value in the topic where it is defined, and if defined in multiple topics, the final value is indeterminate, depending on which files are reviewed first.

-- RaymondLutz - 07 Nov 2003