[pmwiki-users] Hierarchy use case; Hierarchial pages v.s. hierarchical groups

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Tue Jun 6 00:41:53 CDT 2006


On Saturday, 3 June 2006 12:35 PM, Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> wrote:
>In fact the -Talk that you mentioned elsewhere sounds like a wonderful 
>demonstration for hierarchical groups.
>
>Assume there's a feature Foo discussed on PmWiki. It turns out the page 
>becomes too long, so there's a subpage Foo.Talk associated with Foo. Now 
>if Foo is itself in group Cookbook, the .Talk page can be reached under 
>Cookbook.Foo.Talk.

OK now I understand the terminology you are using. But I think calling
this an example of hierarchical groups is perhaps confusing. For
clarity, let's use a comma to denote hierarchy. There seem to be 2 
options (2 different use cases):

a) a group-based hierarchy of Group,Subgroup.Page which suggests there is 
   a page named 'Page' in the group named Group,Subgroup and optionally a 
  page named Subgroup in the group named Group

b) a page-based hierarchy of Group.Page,Subpage would suggest there is a
   page named Page,Subpage in the group named Group and a page named Page
   also in the group named Group

In the case of Cookbook.Foo.Talk what group is ".Talk" in? Is it
named "Foo.Talk" and a member of the Cookbook group or is it (as I read
the example) named "Talk" and a member of the Cookbook.Foo group?
Under case (a) Cookbook.Foo and Cookbook.Foo.Talk are in different
groups, whereas under case (b) they are in the same group.

So here's my answer to the "hierarchical pages vs hierarchical groups"
question. Case (a) is hierarchical groups and (b) is hierarchical pages.

My view is that case (b) is less of a conceptual leap from the current
PmWiki model and more in tune with what other wikis do. But it may also
be more limited in its reach.

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin






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