[Pmwiki-users] Why heirarchy?

[Fred Chittenden]

> On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 10:55:59AM -0700, Fred Chittenden wrote:
> > There's all sorts of applications and uses for hierarchical structure.  
> > For example, I'm fooling around with a soccer club's rec team with about
> > 4000 youth players on several 400 hundred teams.  The most logical
> > structure would seem to be
> > *Rec Soccer
> > **Boys (with ages U7-U18)
> > ***U7
> > ****Schedule and Results
> > ****Team A
> > *****Roster
> > *****Practice schedule
> > *****Team News
> > [...]
> > 
> > SoccerClubBoysU7TeamARoster seems like a rather kludgy long name
workaround
> > to having a regular hierarchical structure, particularly when one might
> > have .  When someone views Team A, they'd only have to link to Roster to
> > get Team A's roster, instead of using a long name, which would clearly
be
> > subject to all sorts of errors.   
>
> This example is excellent, but I need a response to a clarification.
> Per the example, given that someone is viewing Team A, they'd be
> at a page like SoccerBoysU7TeamA.HomePage, and links to the other
> pages would then be [[Roster]], [[Practice schedule]], [[Team News]],
> etc., exactly as you've described.  In the current one-level system, 
> long names only seem to come into play when linking to another team's 
> roster or page, yes? 
 
Or somewhere else in the rec soccer wiki.  Perhaps the most likely thing to
be referred to (linked to) from a team page might be backwards to the
schedule or standings for the league the team is in, such as
SoccerBoysU7Standings, or Soccer/Boys/U7/Standings.  

One also has to be aware that teams in different years frequently have
identical names, which isn't a problem outside of the chance for mistakes
and multiple references in a seach. Also, another 'glitch' (sideissue)
comes up when a new year starts and all of the U7s become U8s.  My solution
is to get the club to start calling their teams by the birth year
(SoccerBoys97), but that's going against tradition, at least in rec soccer. 

> Does that happen with enough frequency to be a concern?

No.  Typically, the primary issue for most endusers (non webmasters) is to
be able to create new sibling pages linked to the current page.  I can see
where a webmaster might like to provide an enduser template for a team page
that used variables of some sort to backtrack to the standings for that age
group's league. 

>  If so, what would be a typical example of a cross-team/ cross-group
link, and what would you expect the markup to look like? >

As mentioned above, backtracking to the league standings might be
desirable.   SoccerBoysU7Standings.  

> Or does the example here envision that each of the "Roster",
"PracticeSchedule", etc. will be groups containing subpages and not
 leaf pages as I've described them here? > > Pm

 I see them more as groups and subgroups than (long name) leaf pages.  That
way, if I have a template page for a new team's web site, it might look like
-----------------------------
Welcome to the <team> web page.

TeamRoster
PracticeSchedule
TeamNews
-----------------------
TeamRoster, ... would be siblings of the parent <team> group.  It's simple
and clean. 
However, I can't see how such a template might would work with long names
unless one somehow used concatenated variables.  Possible example below. 
-----------------------------
Welcome to the <team> web page.

concat(soccer+<sex>+<age>+<team>+Roster)
concat(soccer+<sex>+<age>+<team>+Schedule)
concat(soccer+<sex>+<age>+<team>+News)
-----------------------
To most, creating pages with so much code would look a lot like programming
to the average bubba - hence be poorly utilized.