Subsections

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

guyweb · 2005-10-06 08:07:10

Alicson – yes that’d be v-useful for tagging content and I fully support the idea.

However, it doesn’t solve the problem of subsections and content hierarchy. Whilst I realise that it’s great to tag things, often clients want a structural type of navigation since to put content into. Such sites are neither blog nor news sites and therefore don’t depend on the date of publication to determine the presentation.

Let’s assume we wanted to build the Textbook (http://textpattern.net) using Textpattern instead of MediaWiki. Out of the box, Textpattern will not allow us to do this. Sure, we could hack it a bit and hardcode the navigation in a template but wouldn’t it be great to be able to impose some structure using the Textpattern section/subsection tab?

If this was possible, it would make the statement..

“A free, flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even weblogs.”
(http://www.textpattern.com/)

far more accurate!

Of course Textpattern is absolutely brilliant for blogs and newspaper type websites. The best in the field I’m sure.

davidm · 2005-10-06 08:36:09

<blockquote> alicson wrote: wilshireone: multiple category support in progress </blockquote>

Thx Alicson, totally forgot, too much info on these forums !

That’s a great thing Rob is doing there :-D
I’ll keep tabs on this, most def

Last edited by davidm (2005-10-06 08:36:42)

grad · 2005-10-06 12:18:13

davidm, I used term containers intentionally because I think of them as logical containers. Should it be made with TXP’s sections or categories, I’m not sure. To achieve the goal of CMS — separation of content and presentation — it seems obvious that presentation should be hooked to content structure. With what TXP offers now, it should be sections. However, it may turn out that the concept of content structuring and classification in TXP will need a total rework.

Right now, we can only name for sure the end result — a way to structure and classify content through use of logical multi-level containers — from visitor’s point of view. Should I mention navigation and clean URLs? Having the structure of content we can classify and tag it as needed which may require the content item to belong to more than 2 ‘categories’. Maybe TXP should go orthogonal.

Textpattern is a nice and powerful piece of software. It’s small, fast and has useful admin interface. It may be the CMS of choice for small or even medium (corporate) sites. And that’s the way I want to use it. For bigger or more complex ones I would prefer Xaraya which is more powerful but more complex at the time.

NyteOwl, try Xaraya.

Last edited by grad (2005-10-06 12:21:06)

Deep · 2005-10-11 06:34:53

Actually I am also looking for subsection feature, I had posted one query about it earlier and found kind of work around to it but till now I could not find proper core solution for that.

I have an idea; can zem or any staff member who works on development team can tell how much cost can be involved in it? May be we can donate some money and get it done or something?

I was thinking of using txp for all my new developments but this subsection is stopping me, because in many cases clients need subsections….

for e.g.
Other Services (static page) – Web Designing (static page) – Web Dev (static page)

It will be really helpful if someone can add that feature…

Thanks
Deep

guyweb · 2005-10-11 07:43:45

Deep, I have since discovered that the current version of Wordpress supports sections and subsections, even though they are not called such. You can either do them structurally using ‘pages and subpages’ (if your content is not of the blog or news type) or ‘categories and subcategories’ (if it is blog or news based). Wordpress allows for query-based templates (http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development#Query-based_Templates) which means you can pretty much build any type of website, not just blogs, using Wordpress. I imagine the next version (1.6) will enhance this even further.

So whilst waiting for Textpattern to evolve further, it might be worth considering Wordpress for the time being as I have.

grad · 2005-10-11 08:35:11

Deep, I have since discovered that the current version of Wordpress supports sections and subsections (…)

Interesting. I considered Wordpress but then found TXP which at that time looked more CMS-like than WP. I think I’ll try WP with next project.

There are dozens of CMS systems out there but only few which are able to output standards compliant code (mandatory for me). I mentioned Xaraya already – a great CMS, very powerful and probably the most customizable available. You can do almost anything in it and it has an advanced privileges control, the subsections are not a problem too – there is a dedicated module (xarpages) which lets you ‘model’ site structure from visitor’s point of view. However its biggest drawback is its footprint as it takes al least 9 MB. Also, the configuration takes noticeable time due to its flexibility.

Because of it I was looking for a smaller one. That’s how I found TXP. Unfortunately, due to lack of subsections and very strong blogging heritage TXP is not suitable for “all kinds of websites”.

guyweb, I agree with you. Whilst waiting for TXP to evolve towards CMS it may be worth considering other systems. I think I’ll check Etomite

Last edited by grad (2005-10-11 09:12:20)

ubernostrum · 2005-10-11 08:40:28

FWIW, I think Wordpress has a much stronger “blogging heritage” than TXP… witness the very-recent addition of static pages which can function like sections.

Deep · 2005-10-11 08:43:09

@guyweb – To be frank, I did not find much flexibilty in wordpress compared to txp..
Wordpress is very good for blogging but for full sites I still choose txp..
On my current site also I needed subsections but since it was not possible with this so I installed another txp on subdomain to get the things rolling for the time being…

@grad – I will try the CMS you mentioned…

Deep

Last edited by Deep (2005-10-11 08:45:46)

guyweb · 2005-10-11 08:57:34

Deep – was this using Wordpress 1.5? it’s streets ahead of 1.2. The thing is I’ve not found Textpattern to be very flexible for anything but blogs or news based sites. I guess it’s down to an individual understanding of how the applications work. I recognise that mine is lacking somewhat!

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#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

#37 2005-10-06 08:07:10

Re: Subsections

#38 2005-10-06 08:36:09

Re: Subsections

#39 2005-10-06 12:18:13

Re: Subsections

#40 2005-10-11 06:34:53

Re: Subsections

#41 2005-10-11 07:43:45

Re: Subsections

#42 2005-10-11 08:35:11

Re: Subsections

#43 2005-10-11 08:40:28

Re: Subsections

#44 2005-10-11 08:43:09

Re: Subsections

#45 2005-10-11 08:57:34

Re: Subsections

Board footer