[pmwiki-users] New Hierarchical Groups Recipe...

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Thu Feb 1 16:21:00 CST 2007


On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 12:28:31PM -0500, The Editor wrote:
> On 1/31/07, Hans <design5 at softflow.co.uk> wrote:
> > Wednesday, January 31, 2007, 3:08:27 PM, The wrote:
> > > A quick announcement that I just released the Hierarchical Groups
> > > recipe I've been working on.
> >
> > > See:  http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Hg
> >
> > Could that be please be put on a page named
> > Cookbook.HierarchicalGroups
> > instead of the cryptic abbreviation "Hg"?
> 
> I went ahead and created the page and did a temporary include from Hg.
>  I didn't use the full name as I was under the impression Pm would one
> day create his own Hg system.  But if he gives the go ahead, I'll
> delete Hg, and just use the one HierarchicalGroups page.

I'm not quite sure how to respond here.  I don't have any issue
with a recipe using the page "Cookbook.HierarchicalGroups", as I
don't have any plans for occupying that page myself.  If/when PmWiki 
gets a hierarchical capability, it'll likely be bunded as part of
the core and documented in a PmWiki.* page.  (Whether it's enabled
or disabled by default is a question to be decided much later.)

But what does concern me a bit here is that people not find themselves
being misled as to what the recipe does and does not do.  It's been
my experience that when people think of "hierarchical groups",
what they're really expecting is to be able to write urls like:

    http://www.example.com/wiki/Kingdom/Main
    http://www.example.com/wiki/Kingdom/Animal/Main
    http://www.example.com/wiki/Kingdom/Animal/Canine/Main
    http://www.example.com/wiki/Kingdom/Plant/Main

As far as I can tell, this recipe doesn't really achieve this
goal (yet?), so calling it "hierarchical groups" feels a bit
like false advertising or something.

The recipe page also makes the claim:

    This recipe adds hierarchical groups functionality to 
    your website. The following items are included: group headers, 
    group footers, group sidebars, group attributes, config files, 
    styles sheets.  They basically work in the way, and in the 
    order you would expect, including all default settings. 

I'm not sure that I agree that it works as most people expect.
If I'm wrong in this, I'd love to have people re-clarify their
expectations and contrast them with what's in the existing
PmWiki.HierarchicalGroups pages, because I think it's a feature
that many people want.

Perhaps we just need a different name for the type of
grouping that is being performed here.  Or perhaps
we've traditionally misnamed hierarchical groups, and
its name needs to change.

I'm not saying anything needs to change, yet; I just know that
I'm concerned that many people will come looking to this recipe
to provide features of hierarchies that just aren't there (yet?).

(And I fear that systems that promise more than they can deliver
can really kill a product or community.)

Pm



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