Thanks very much - this was very clear. I was wondering though, you hadn't responded to the first question directly below. I'm still unsure of the relationship between Explorer's CategoryRoot and the CategoryCategory and if they can / should be the same. Also, in my fresh install of MoinMoin 1.7.2 there don't seem to be CategoryMissing, CategoryOrphaned, and CategoryUnderlay - I've created those now but am unsure if the "system" will know what to do with them. Thanks - and I love the theme by the way.


Can / should we make the CategoryRoot the same as CategoryCategory in the default Moin wiki?

I've read all the category help pages, but I think the developers have a difficult time taking themselves "out of the box" and thinking about what all of this looks like to an outsider.

Here are some basic questions about how Explorer works with categories:

  1. The only way to create a category is to make a link, then a new page, and make that page from a category template, correct? The Explorer setup doc says to start creating categories, but really you have to do that by linking from pages that are already in your wiki right? There is no way to edit the CategoryCategory page therefore there's no way to just create categories without having a page that you are linking to it, correct?

    • Categories are just like ordinary pages except that their name satisfies a special regular expression (in English language per default having suffix Category). It really doesn't matter if you use a template or create it from scratch. Please refer to the Moin help pages for more detail on creating pages and categorization (especially the pages HelpOnPageCreation and HelpOnCategories).

  2. Explorer uses subpage structures and categories, correct? Subpages have a hierarchy and therefore can provide your folder structure, however, different folders and even their child docs can belong to the same category, correct? So you essentially have a link hierarchy and a category hierarchy, both of which are displayed in the explorer?
    • Subpages are naturally mapped to the Explorer tree structure. Please note that subpages are always displayed as a sub node of its parent page. They are never displayed as a sub node of their categories. Actually their categorization is ignored so subpages will never appear apart from their parent pages. As a result you won't have to categorize sub pages (although it's not forbidden to do so). See ../Subpages are not visible in the Navigation-Category tree. The category hierarchy however is actually a link hierarchy as categorization is done by linking. In short the tree is built by the following principles:

      1. Attachments are sub nodes of their pages.
      2. Sub pages are sub nodes of their parents.
      3. Parents are sub pages of their categories.
  3. If I have a page "MoinMoin" to describe all my MoinMoin related stuff, and everything under there is about MoinMoin, and it would therefore make sense to have a MoinMoin category, is it recommended that I somehow change that page into a category page or create a category and then add that page to it? I guess I'm still struggling with how categories are superimposed over the wiki or if their actually part of the wiki structure itself.

    • Well categories are nothing new to Moin and are not introduced by the Explorer theme. The Explorer theme just makes use of it and makes the categorization “visible”. You always have the choice in Moin of creating a hierarchy by linking to a category page or by creating sub pages. I am using a mixture of both. On higher levels I am using categorization and on lower levels I am using sub pages. This is to reduce the number of categories to a reasonable size.

      I also use “sub categories”. For example you may have a category CategoryFruits and sub categories CategoryFruits/ILike and CategoryFruits/IDislike. This allows you to also have a category CategoryPeople/ILike. You can’t achieve this behavior by having a general category CategoryILike belonging to CategoryFruits and also to category CategoryPeople.

thanks

MoinMoin: ThemeMarket/Explorer/Questions/CategoryConfusion (last edited 2008-10-13 12:42:03 by WolfgangFischer)