Sputnik: Conceptual Model

**This page is a bit out of date.**

Sputnik is a wiki in the sense that it is committed to the wiki data model of versioned pages.  A __page__ is the basic unit of Sputnik.  Almost everything is a page.  Each page has history and most can be modified by any user who has an account.  Internally, each page consists of two parts: __metadata__ and __content__.  The metadata typically includes the following fields:

* `title`: the name of the page as shown to the user
* `author`: the user who created this version
* `summary`: the summary of the change from the previous version

Each page also has __content__.  When a page is used as a regular wiki page, the content is assumed to be text formatted with [[Markdown]].  However, depending on your configuration, the content of a page can be anything, and having the content be set [[Lua]] code would be particularly common.

Each page supports a set of [[Actions]].  The following actions are built-in and thus apply to all pages (they can be overriden, though):

* `PAGE_NAME.show` - display the page as HTML, with a navigation bar, etc.
* `PAGE_NAME.edit` - display the basic edit form for the page
* `PAGE_NAME.save` - save the page (when submitted by the basic form)
* `PAGE_NAME.history` - show page history
* `PAGE_NAME.diff` - show a diff from an earlier version
* `PAGE_NAME.show_inner` - display just the content part of HTML.
* `PAGE_NAME.edit_raw` - display the form that allows altering the underlying representation of the page
* `PAGE_NAME.save_raw` - save the page (when submitted by the "raw" form)
* `PAGE_NAME.code` - show the content of the page "as is", wrapped in the standard HTML (nav bar, etc.)
* `PAGE_NAME.raw` - show the content of the page "as is" - in plain text

Some of the actions take additional parameters, which may be optional.  E.g., PAGE_NAME.show takes an optional "version" parameter that specifies which version of the page that should be shown.
The parameters are encoded as separate CGI parameters, while the page name and it's action are passed as a single CGI parameter "p", separated by a dot.  E.g.:

http://.../sputnik.cgi?p=Sputnik.show&version=2007-05-04%2012:53:34

However, the "show" action is assumed by default and thus can be omitted, so instead we can use:

http://.../sputnik.cgi?p=Sputnik&version=2007-05-04%2012:53:34

Or, if we are using URL-rewriting:

http://www.freewisdom.org/projects/sputnik/Sputnik&version=2007-05-04%2012:53:34

Compare this with:

http://www.freewisdom.org/projects/sputnik/Sputnik.edit

Actions can be overridden and new actions can be added to specific pages.  E.g., the [[Special:RSS]] page has a custom ".rss" action which returns the RSS feed for the wiki.

## Special Pages

As I said above, almost everything on Sputnik is represented as a page.  E.g.:

* [[_navigation]] - stores the navigation bar
* [[_colors]], [[_layout]], and [[_fonts]] - stylesheets used by the wiki
* [[_templates]] - the default set of templates

Page Name (for URL)

Page Title

Breadcrumb Text

Page Content

Advanced Fields

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