[pmwiki-users] Fwd: RFC PmWiki Tips and Tricks

Martin Fick mogulguy at yahoo.com
Tue Sep 26 12:30:56 CDT 2006


--- Pico <pmwiki at ben-amotz.com> wrote:

> That distinction was what I was looking for when I
> first started using PmWiki. 
> (In fact, I started going through the Cookbook group
> and listing recipes into
> one camp or the other).  
 

Well, I think that most people agree that Cookbook
organization could be improved. Allowing people to be
able to search by "script or not" can be valuable, but
it does not seem like the "one right way" to organize
recipes.  In fact, I don't think that there is "one
right way" and that is what we have categories for! 
As Patrick has pointed out, there is already a
Cookbook page organized by categories.  It has some
performance issues and I would argue some
organizational issues too since it is merely a
reimplementation of the current Cookbook index.  

But these are things that we should be able to fix! 
We are afterall advocating the use of categories to
organize wiki content, we should be "eating our own
dog food" shouldn't we?  I know that we have
categories, but they are not centrally used to
organize our site and therefore they are not perfectly
maintained.

I have built upon the Cookbook by categories idea and
created a test group called "Recipes".  This group is
designed to be mostly a "virtual group".  The content
for most pages in this group are created by the
GroupFooter which has a pagelist in it.  The main idea
is to split the large cookbook index into many smaller
indexes organized by categories.  These should load
much faster than one large index and maybe be more
manageable.  The large index should still exist too
since some people may want to browse that way, but a
slight performance loss may be acceptable if this is
no longer the default way to browse things?

I have setup a tenative index for the group which
could be an idea of what a main entry point for
recipes could look like.  It is very raw and still
needs work, but maybe it could be useful? (It is
mainly a copy and paste of the cookbook by cateogries
page.)

http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Recipes/ByCategory

Since much of the meta-data needed to support this is
incomplete, this will not be perfect and takes some
work to get right.  But relying on the meta-data to
organize things is a good way to get the meta data
correct isn't it?  Some important meta-data needed for
this idea:

  Cookbook Categories
  Cookbook summaries
  Titles for Category pages

There are also still some kinks because this is a
vitual group.  Links to pages in it will become edit
links (a perfect use case for the potential upcoming
virtual groups?)

Time to add a category for Scripts on recipes? :)

-Martin


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