Subsections

alicson · 2005-04-08 20:52:59

another agreement on the usefulness of subsections.
a section about books with subsections fiction and nonfiction, for example, makes more sense than having three sections: books, fiction, nonfiction all at the same level…
however, that’s the way it is right now, so that’s more than liveable for me. but the subsections option would be welcome :)

i have no qualms with article ids, btw.. i think the way they work to assure working permalinks is excellent.

davidm · 2005-04-09 10:41:38

I think what everyone is looking for (just as I am) is the ability to file categories (and subcategories) under a specific section.

Section are intended for presentation and style, which is consistent with a group of content of the same nature, I agree. One “simple” thing to organize sections would be to use… categories. Only you’d be able to optionally define what section you file it under. You could let it be in the default section (which is what TxP does now, in fact), or in a particular section.

As for the SPIP reference : Jeremie, I think categories in TxP indeed akeen to the keyword system in SPIP. It’s a taxonomy, sort of an horizontal structure aimed at facilitating content indexing. Sections are akeen to SPIP’s rubriques. Too bad SPIP is not standards compliant and tableless, and Agora fork is so heavy…

atrox · 2005-04-09 15:11:02

What I’m looking for, is ability to have more than 2 levels in the structure. At the moment I can’t really find the way to do it. Another thing is that categories don’t display properly in Search Engine friendly mode – they’re still required to have ?c=Category+Name in the URL. It would be nice to have a simple, clean URL like: /section/sub-section/category/sub-category/

Also, sections names are tied to their URL name. As in: ‘Section Name’ becomes Section-name’ and to output its name on the page one has to use ‘Section-name’ which looks a bit weird. But that’s another story and I think there is a plug in for it, I just haven’t tried it yet.

guyweb · 2005-10-05 10:55:04

When building a complex site using sections and subsections could the following scenario work?

It is a purely visual usability idea, not a URL structure one or anything like that.

1. You might need “sections” at all.

Most of the stuff that changes on a per template basis is probably the same, you just want the navigation highlighting to change.

2. Use categories instead

Organisational structure of content can be achieved using categories without any need for sections. You can have hierarchys of categories which you can’t have with sections.

3. Pass the value of the category1 name (not category title) to body class=”(category name)”

In order to illustrate to the user where they are within the site, you could pass the variable of the category name to the class of the HTML body tag.

4. Use CSS to illustrate to the user which page s/he is on

Assume that the cateogry name is “carvings”. This value is passed to the HTML:

There is some navigation already defined in the main template:

<ul id=“nav”>
<li class=“home”><a href=”#”>Home</a></li>
<li class=“carvings”><a href=”#”>Carvings</a></li>
<li class=“sculptures”><a href=”#”>Sculptures</a></li>
<li class=“about”><a href=”#”>About</a></li>
</ul>

Each link (li) has a class assigned: “home”, “carvings”, “sculptures”, “about”

And in our CSS file we have some rules..

body.home li.home,
body.carvings li.carvings,
body.sculptures li.sculptures,
body.about li.about {font-weight:bold;}

The CSS would match the “carvings” in the bod class with the “carvings” in the nav list item class and apply the styling (however complex you choose to make it).

As far as I can tell, this can also work for infinitely complex nav structures..

But I may be wrong.

Any thoughts?

Last edited by guyweb (2005-10-05 10:59:09)

grad · 2005-10-05 12:51:35

What we really need is a way to structure and classify content of the site and ability to do it as easy as possible. The easiness is important — remember that publishers are often people who may get lost when faced with a non-intuitive workaround. If TXP is to become a CMS that can be used not only for personal sites but for corporate ones it is a must.

Let’s focus on the functionality:

We need a way to put content of the same nature into separate containers.
We need a way to apply different layout and style to those containers and its content.
We need a way to apply additional classification to content. The classification should be of two kinds: container-sensitive and site-wide.

For 1. & 2. TXP 4.0.1 provides sections, but limits them to only one level. Sections control layout and styling. Expanding them to allow more levels seems to be the way to go to allow layout and styling.

For 3. TXP provides categories which are multi-level but are only site-wide. Adding option to hook them to (sub)sections may be the way to go. I support david’s idea.

One important note about clean URLs — they should be really clean. They should look like <code>site.com/section-name/[sub-section-name/]category-name/[sub-category-name/]</code> when displayed under a section or <code>site.com/category-name/[sub-category-name/]</code> for site-wide only categories when not displayed under a section. Also adding more categories would might be useful, e.g. for multilingual sites.

Last edited by grad (2005-10-05 13:05:23)

davidm · 2005-10-05 13:34:45

grad, that’s a good summary of what we need, and I agree on this being a must-have for corporate websites. This has been a much discussed subject and most seasonned veterans here agree that we should have subsections and/or the ability to hook categories under sections.

The thing is currently categories are not truly hierarchical even if you have category1 category2 for a given article… I’ll even go as far as saying that categories in txp are more akin to what would in fact conceptually be content tagging… we lack a tool to really organize content in categories which in fact as you say should be “containers” (in the sense of logical containers).

I know that the goal of a CMS is to make a clean separation between content and presentation. The current state of what we have with txp is :
content <=> categories
presentation <=> section

If we go deeper (please help me and correct me here) :

each section can have a different CSS

Different CSS means different styling : fonts, positionning, colors…

each section can have a different page

Different pages means different information structure (through html elements)
Different pages means different txp tags for each section (but this can be achieved with a single page with conditionnals)

each article can belong to

a section
up to two categories

we can

display a list of section w/link (<code><txp:section_list /></code>)
display a list of categories w/link (<code><txp:category_list /></code>)
display a list of all the articles by section (<code><txp:rss_suparchive /></code>)
display a list of all the articles by category (<code><txp:rss_suparchive /></code>)
display a liste of all the articles of a given category (<code><txp:article_custom> with category parameter</code>)
display a list of all the articles of a given section (<code><txp:article_custom> with section parameter</code>)
display only the articles of the current section (use <code><txp:if_article_section></code> in form)
display only the articles of the current category (use <code><txp:if_article_category></code> in form)

… (needs to be completed)

we can’t (???)

display a list of link with categories filed under sections
display a list of all articles belonging to a given section and to a given category1
display a list of all articles belonging to a given section and to a given category2
display a list of all articles belonging to a given section and to a given category1+category2

… (needs to be completed)

Last edited by davidm (2005-10-05 18:10:59)

guyweb · 2005-10-05 13:50:06

After spending lunch thinking this through in my head I’m sure that you are both right. The answer is to indicate structural relationships using sections, subsections etc. Categories and sub-categories are a red herring.

Still a massive problem for me is the fact that an article can only belong to a maximum of two categories. It might be worth re-thinking the categories in a way similar to the del.icio.us method. Yes, i know you can add keywords but not in the nice inituitive way of del.icio.us. But why have categories and keywords in Textpattern – since both do the same thing! Keywords certainly take care of the flat, unstructured type of content browsing but there needs to be soemthing for those sites that read like documentation and have distinct taxonomy.

Maybe we just need a method of relating structure to content (similar to what already exists for category relationships)..

page
page
page
- page
- page
  - page
page

everything is a page. You’d then apply rules to the relationships. For example, If page is two levels deep and the parent = (parent-title) then apply this template..

I think you’d probably end up needing structural organisation ability akin to that on Typo, for example to get this working but it may sort things out for those of us who dont want to build blogs but want to use txp for full-blow e-commerce, intranets and other structurally organised material.

I think i’m starting to get the logic together in my head..

NyteOwl · 2005-10-05 18:28:21

This is part of the conceptual problems I have been having in trying to port a static site to TXP; it has a structure similar to mentioned above that seems to overflow the available ontology/taxonomy available. For example a collection of papers/articles are currently sorted as follows (somewhat abridged):

ROOT
<ul> Technology <ul> Internet <ul> Web Applications <ul> Storage Group Collaboration Web Mail </ul> Intellectual Property Transport Protocols Peer-to-Peer Networks </ul> Security <ul> Firewalls Intrusion Detection Systems Proxies Content Filtering <ul> E-Mail <ul> SPAM Malware </ul> Web Traffic </ul> </ul> Electronics </ul> Psychology
</ul>

etc.

As can be seen, SPAM articels for example are actually: /technology/security/contentfiltering/email/spam/articlename

A basic Section/Category with cross reference to Section/Category2 just doesn’t provide the clarity or granularity, unless I am missing something. Is there some easy way to implement this short of expanding the tree down to only 2 levels or doing some serious hacking at some custom patches?

davidm · 2005-10-05 18:43:33

I don’t think txp can cover your needs there, and I don’t even know if it could be patched to do such a thing… Things are planned to improve this kind of taxonomy, and future realease should drastically improve the way section/category will work, but it’s not a short term thing and we don’t know in which direction this will lead…

What you need is a tool with unlimited hierarchical subdivisions for content… my guess would be toy with Drupal who offers an extended taxonomy module, but in fact I never had this kind of need thus I am not sure which tool would be the most appropriate…

alicson · 2005-10-05 18:46:38

well, we have primary categories and subcategories… that’s covered with category1 and category2 built-in features…. it’s possible that a multi-category feature could come up in the near future… if the TextSuperheroes oblige…

inst · 2005-10-05 19:15:10

i installed wordpress the other day for a site just for a change of pace, and i have to say their category structure seems to work for everything you are discussing. categories need to be able to be nested, and you should be able to select as many categories as you want for an article. i think in txp pages and sections are essentially the same thing.

alicson · 2005-10-06 03:15:08

wilshireone: multiple category support in progress

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#25 2005-04-08 20:52:59

Re: Subsections

#26 2005-04-09 10:41:38

Re: Subsections

#27 2005-04-09 15:11:02

Re: Subsections

#28 2005-10-05 10:55:04

Re: Subsections

#29 2005-10-05 12:51:35

Re: Subsections

#30 2005-10-05 13:34:45

Re: Subsections

#31 2005-10-05 13:50:06

Re: Subsections

#32 2005-10-05 18:28:21

Re: Subsections

#33 2005-10-05 18:43:33

Re: Subsections

#34 2005-10-05 18:46:38

Re: Subsections

#35 2005-10-05 19:15:10

Re: Subsections

#36 2005-10-06 03:15:08

Re: Subsections

Board footer