[Pmwiki-users] Hierarchical Group vs Virtual Groups (Was: ... hierarchical content?)

[Stefan Candea]

> Anyway, I'm just trying to illustrate that 'group' hasn't really been
> defined yet. If we for instance decided that a page called 'A' may not
> have a child page called 'A', then we could define a group as a page
> together with its child pages.

I took today's PmWiki definition/usage for 'group'.  And is not a page,
but a grouping that spawns child pages and applies defaults to all of
them, unless otherwise specified.  It also defaults the search to the
child pages.

In my view is really what a 'directory' with presentation defaults would
be.  I use 'directory' for argument sake, as is the closest structure that
comes to my mind.  However for the user it's transparent and is more like
a path in the URI

> However, the above does not mean that I think groups are bad (in some ways
> I even want to be able to let a page belong to several "groups").

He he, wouldn't that be nice?  That would have to be defined externally in
some kind of category relationships.  Hmm, again, what comes to my mind is
like a folder (group) with links instead of physical files.  This is
separate from the physical structure.

We should diferentiate 'group' and 'category'.  First one being
structure-bound, the other one virtual.

>
> Here's an idea:
> * First we introduce a mechanism for explicitly defining a group of pages

As I would like to also store the pages in the same hierarchical
structure, why not define it as the directory (technically speaking) and
as parent of child pages (in end-user language).  In this case each page
can only have 1 parent.  Again, pages could be grouped (later) in
(virtual) categories.

> * Then we introduce a special markup for linking to a page within a group.
>
> For example, this markup
>        [[SomeGroup:SomePage]]
> would link to the page called 'SomePage' in the group named 'SomeGroup'.

If we had virtual categories, indeed something like this could work.
* [[SomeGroup/SomePage]] for structural path (groups: 1 parent to many
children relationship)
* [[SomeGroup:SomePage]] for a virtual one (categories: 1 child belongs to
several categories - need restriction for same page names in different
groups)

-- 
Stefan