[Pmwiki-users] Re: any conclusion on catagories ?
Patrick R. Michaud
pmichaud
Sat Oct 23 08:31:10 CDT 2004
This is just a long "work message" to myself in response to Christian's
message to see how a "category navigation sidebar" might be constructed.
Feel free to ignore this post.
For reference, I've duplicated the category tree we've been using
for discussion (Category.Genre, Category.Horror, etc.) at the
bottom of this post.
> How could we use this hiearchy to automatically generate navigation links?
> [...] how can we make the sidebar automatically contain a list of siblings?
> (Or something equivalent to a wiki trail, but we don't manually maintain
> the list of trail pages, it is derived from the category).
The method I've been using to create hierarchical navigation trees is to
display the siblings of the current page as well as the siblings of each
of the page's ancestors (in whatever tree structure exists). So, for
Film.InMyFathersDen, we'd see
Category
Genre
Comedy
Documentary
Drama
InMyFathersDen
Horror
Year
2003
2004
InMyFathersDen
For Film.SeanOfTheDead, we'd get
Category
Genre
Comedy
SeanOfTheDead
Documentary
Drama
Horror
Year
2003
SeanOfTheDead
TheCorporation
2004
What becomes interesting is when things aren't placed in a category.
For example, if Film.ReturnOfTheKing is in [[Category/2003]] and
[[Category/Fantasy]], but Category.Fantasy isn't (yet) listed as
being in [[Category/Genre]], we'd get something like:
Category
Genre
Year
2003
ReturnOfTheKing
SeanOfTheDead
TheCorporation
Fantasy
ReturnOfTheKing
Perhaps this would be a cue to someone that Fantasy needs to be added
within the Category hierarchy (which is very simple: click on "Fantasy",
edit page, add [[Category/Genre]], save, we're done).
But if we have Film.FindingNemo and it's listed only as
[[Category/Animation]], we'd see
Animation
FindingNemo
and "Category" wouldn't appear at all because it's not yet in
Finding Nemo's direct ancestry. Somehow this doesn't bother me--while
some people might like to see a "grand unified category scheme",
allowing categories to be disjoint appeals to me greatly.
I'll have to play with this a bit to see what can be developed--at least
on the surface it appears really interesting, cool, and definitely worthwhile
for PmWiki.
Here's the original page tree for those who are playing along at home.
> > Category.Category
> > Category.Genre
> > Category.Comedy
> > Film.SeanOfTheDead
> > Category.Drama
> > Film.InMyFathersDen
> > Category.Documentary
> > Film.TheCorporation
> > Category.Horror
> > Film.SeanOfTheDead
> > Category.Year
> > Category.2003
> > Film.SeanOfTheDead
> > Film.TheCorporation
> > Category.2004
> > Film.InMyFathersDen
Pm
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