+[[!meta date="2007-04-29 22:48:35 +0000"]]
+
As of version 2.0, ikiwiki will switch to enabling the 'usedirs' setting by
default. This *will* break all URLs to wikis that did not have 'usedirs'
turned on before. You can either follow this procedure to convert your wiki
or manually.
* Since usedirs is enabled, ikiwiki will have created a bunch of new
html files. Where before ikiwiki generated a `dest/foo.html`, now it will
- generate `dest/foo/index.html`. But, the old html files will still be
- present too. Remove them:
- find dest -name \*.html -not -name index.html -exec rm {} \;
+ generate `dest/foo/index.html`. The old html files will be removed.
* If you have a blog that is aggregated on a Planet or similar, all the
items in the RSS or atom feed will seem like new posts, since their URLs
have changed. See [[howto_avoid_flooding_aggregators]] for a workaround.
* Now all the URLs to pages in your wiki have changed. See
[[redirections_for_usedirs]] for instructions on setting up redirections
to keep the old URLs working.
+
+Why usedirs?
+------------
+There are several advantages to `usedirs`, including simpler URLs, URLs that
+aren't dependent on the underlying implementation (`.html`), and being able to
+use URLs as tags as described in the [rel-tag
+microformat](http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag).
+
+The main disadvantage is that it is harder to browse using `file://` URIs,
+since `file:///dir/` doesn't automatically translate to `dir/index.html`. This
+is something one could fix in the browser though.