[Pmwiki-users] Categories instead of hierarchies? (was: can pmwiki handle hierarchical content?)

[Knut Alboldt]

In general, I like the category concept more than the hierachical ones.
If it wouldn't be too many files in one directory I even would prefer no 
group, but it is quite usable as a main category (and to keep the files 
directories lesser).

What I need more would be a possibility to connect these pages to different 
categories, I always have these problems with:
- storing bookmarks
- archiving mails
- IT inventory (a maintainance-contract for a pc-software: is it a 
software, a contract or a pc-componente ?)

so what I started to do is using a keyword or category-line within the 
text, so it's easy to find with the wiki-search (if you define the right 
keywords / categories :-).

Another thing would be a index of a category:
- it can be done by scanning the pages for the membership of the category, 
then it will be sorted (in any way) (maybe a special wikisearch has to be 
implemented)
- if I need it unsorted, i.e. sorted by my own idea, I can use a trail-page 
with full qualified pagenames (group/page) and may be a check-script to 
ensure that all of the category is in the trail (copuld be something like:
   [:restofthecategory:]
   - define the category for this trail
   - get all defined entries in this trail
   - get all pagenames with the same categories (might be slow, see below 
(1) :)
   - replace directive by all the pages I missed inthe trail-list
so I can manually put the missing into the trail-list.

1) to make the categories-scan faster, it could be worth to set up an index 
(sql-db based / php-array etc) of all pages / categories after editing a 
page (also useful for things like (big) PITS - I'm just working on that). 
This index could be used for faster processing the directive.

So I'm quite hape with the group/page-structure, expanding this by the 
categories-capability.

Knut