[pmwiki-devel] Idea: Make the search results list categories of each matching page

[christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com]

On Thu, 28 Dec 2006, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 23, 2006 at 11:08:29PM +0100, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
>> While talking to a friend this evening over bears, we had the idea that it
>> could be useful if the default search results displayed the categories
>> each matching page belongs to.
>
> How do you want them displayed?  A comma-separated list of categories, 
> with links to the appropriate page?

Here's a user case. Let's assume a reader searched for "java" and got the 
following results (with categories):

* [[StarBucks]]			([[!Beverages]]; [[!Coffee shops]])
* [[Indonesian restaurants]]	([[!Indonesia]]; [[!Tourism]])
* [[Tutorial]]			([[!Java]]; [[!Scripts]])
* [[Boutique]]			([[!Applications]]; [[!Java]]; [[!Java applets]])
* [[Java world]]
* [[Lecture on Java]]

My thinking is that since "java" could be related to coffee, programming 
and Indonesia, the user is helped a lot by being able to see what 
categories the different pages belong to. Being able to sort the results 
according to the categories might be good as well.

> (Could you give an example of what you think the pagelist should look 
> like?)

See the example above. Something like this should also be fine and leaves 
room for any page descriptions to be shown.

* [[StarBucks]]
   (Coffee shops; Beverages)
* [[Indonesian restaurants]]
   (Indonesia; Tourism)
* [[Tutorial]]
   (Java; Scripts)
* [[Boutique]]
   (Java applets; Applications)
* [[Java world]]
* [[Java lecture]]


However, maybe what is really needed is a page variable for extracting the 
categories. Then we could play with different page lists to see what we 
like.

> What about pages that don't belong to any categories?

In the example above, pages without categories don't appear any different 
from today. If we wanted we could denote these pages with "()".

Btw, this would be a quick way to list those pages that don't belong to 
any categories.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr