[Pmwiki-users] Cookbook Re-Organization (Discussion)

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 02:43:00PM -0800, Steven Leite wrote:
> 
>    Problem:  The Cookbook is  starting to look a bit large.  

Agreed, I've been planning to reorganize it for some time but haven't had 
a chance to do so yet (because I'm hard at work on the 0.6 release :-).
Plus, several of the recipes may be obsoleted by the 0.6 release.


>    Solution:   Shuffle  these  "recipe's"  around  a  bit, move them to a
>    different  pages  or  create  a  new  group  for  them.  My suggestion
>    involved  creating  three  Groups  or  categories  for these recipe's.
>    Cookbook,  AdvancedCookbook,  and  PatchesAndFixes.    [...]

I'd prefer not to create new groups for the recipes, because
1.  It'd change the URIs of the pages (if anyone has them bookmarked--
    and "cool URIs don't change").
2.  When looking for a recipe I don't want to have to remember what
    group it might be in,
3.  It's a bit of a pain to move pages from one group to another.

Instead of creating separate groups, I recommend simply dividing the
page up into sections, similar to the way that the PmWiki.DocumentationIndex
is divided into beginning editing, intermediate editing, page organization,
and site administration sections.

Also, organizationally I think it'd be better to organize the recipes
by the kind of functionality they provide, rather than the programming
involved in achieving that.  Most people will be looking for solutions
to a particular need, without worrying about whether the solution is
a simple patch/fix or a complex module.  Perhaps we could organize the 
index page into categories based on what the recipes achieve: e.g., 
  * commonly-used recipes and configuration changes
      e.g., DisableWikiWords, PreventUploadOverwrites, ChangeTimeFormat
  * recipes that add/change markup
      RevisionMarks, SmartQuotes, TextArea, UsefulInterMapLinks
  * recipes that add significant new features
      PublishWikiTrail, UsingRSSFeed, WikiCalendar, MyPmWiki
  * recipes for page management/organization
      PageRename, ExpireDiff, SimplePageCache

These are just suggestions--I'm open for other suggestions.  Also,
keep in mind that we're not limited to one index, we could always
create Cookbook.IndexByRecipeType or Cookbook.IndexAlphabetical pages
as WikiTrails to organize the recipes according to a different
scheme.  Finally, if the complexity of the recipe is important, we could
simply mark each recipe in the index with an indication of its complexity
(patch, one-liner, advanced, etc.).

Pm