[pmwiki-users] Hiearchical Groups Proposal.

[Stirling Westrup]

The Editor wrote:

> My suggestion though is to back and analyze why we want hierarchical
> groups.  To me it seems the reasons break down into a couple general
> areas:
> 
> 1) To set attributes for multiple groups at one time (by setting
> something in a super group, and have it apply to all the the sub
> groups under it). Similarly to do the same things for local.config
> files. One file controls config settings for all the subgroups.

This is certainly one reason I want them. There are many times when I
want to use a different skin, or have a different password policy for a
section of the wiki. Currently I do this with farm fields, but a
Hierarchy could be much neater.

> 2) To be able to specify in pagelists and searchboxes whole sets of
> groups (by saying search such and such super group and all the
> subgroups are automatically included.

This too.

> If there are other reasons, I'd like to consider them because I have
> an idea, based on my experience with Drupal that could meet these
> needs in an even better way.  Something they called taxonomy.

Well, I also just naturally tend to think in hierarchies, because of
past training. Its sometimes difficult to shoehorn things into the
Group.Page paradigm as a consequence.

> Instead of actually having real "hierarchical groups", they used
> virtual groups, with a complicated scheme we could do much better at
> with catagories.  If there was a way to define attributes for
> categories (how about Something.CategoryAttribute?action=attr) or the
> like, and then apply those attributes to any page with that category
> tag, you could easily create hierarchies with great flexibility and
> power (ie, pages could be in multiple groups, and some pages from some
> groups could all be linked together, etc).

This could get very complicated, but it does have real promise. One
problem I'm facing now is that there is a site that I want to make that
has two different organizational principals at the same time. The data
wants to be organized according to topics and subtopics (and maybe
sub-subtopics), but it also needs to be organized as Secret, Privileged
or Public, a given page will migrate from Secret (one or two users with
access) to Privileged (all moderators have access) to Public (everyone
has access), but we want it to be organized correctly in its topic
structure as it does.

Hierarchical groups would *help* with this, but something better would
be required to really solve the problem.