Page & File Aliasing

What is an alias?

Pie allows you to create aliases, i. e. pages that do not contain any text, but solely serve as proxies for other pages. As such, aliases bear names much the same as pages do. However, instead of serving as content providers, aliases have but a single attribute - the name of an other page, the page for which it acts as a proxy. If an alias is called upon to be displayed, it forwards the user to that page instead. The process of redirection takes place completely transparently.

Say, you just created a page called Reykjavik that contains arbitrary text. Now, you create several aliases of this page, BelovedCity, CapitalOfIceland and NorthernmostCapital, that can be accessed by their names, respectively, and, instead of providing content themselves, redirect to Reykjavik.

Now that's practical. The grown name space by which a page is addressed not only allows you to refer to a page in several contexts, it also allows for spelling variants without the need of creating full-featured pages for each variant. You can create and remove any number of aliases pointing to a page without changing that page's content itself. You can also use aliases to serve as forwarders to pages whose names, for whatever reason, are about to change. If a page that has been known under its name for a long time is to be renamed, an alias with the old name of the page can jump in to bridge the gap, redirecting requests for the old name to the new one.

How can it be created?

To create an alias of the current page simply select Alias from the page panel. You will be asked for a name for the alias-to-be. If an other alias with that name exists, it will be overwritten. If a page with that name exists, a warning will be issued and the alias will not be created.

Files may also be aliased. Display the file info of a file and select Alias from the file panel to create an alias for it in the same way you'd create an alias for a page.