[Pmwiki-users] Re: any conclusion on catagories ?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

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