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

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 04:21:00PM -0600, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> 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:
> 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.

I agree.  And I love this recipe, so I'm not dissing the recipe, but
since it doesn't provide a total full-blown "hierarchical groups"
functionality, and probably won't, just a mostly-hg layer over the top
of the existing stuff, it probably needs a different name.

A few suggestions:

Hg (the original name)
PseudoHierarchy
PseudoHG
HGLayer
HGOverlay
SubGroups
Phylum
Genus
Clan
Cluster
GroupCluster (because it clusters groups together)
 
> 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.

I second this concern.

> 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.)

Agreed!  We don't want people not appreciating this recipe because it
promises more than it delivers, because it does deliver nice things.

(As an aside: I've found a problem with the $g1... variables and
pagelists; they don't work.  I think I know what the problem is -- the
variables are being set from the current pagename, they aren't taking
a pagename and processing it -- but I won't be able to work on a fix
until tonight or tomorrow)

Kathryn Andersen
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