Forum OpenACS Q&A: XoWiki - standardized user interface / document views question/request

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1: XoWiki - standardized user interface / document views question/request
Posted by Robert Taylor on 01/27/06 05:33 PM
I have been creating pages in XoWiki and I have found my self in need of a persistent "user interface" or "view" for the pages in XoWiki.

In order to continue creating more content pages, I require the ability to categorize/subcategorize all pages into a hieararchical relationship, preferably expressed as a hierarchical menu on the left hand side of the page.

In discussions with others, some suggestion have been made that a hierarchical 'view' of the pages may not be the best way to do things for all viewers, thus perhaps being able to offer other types of 'views' such as 'last changed, by author, alphabetical, etc' might be just as valid.

My question to anyone in the know, what would be the best way to implement this? How would you guys extend xowiki and in what way to enable this?

Most importantly, how much work would you guys estimate this to be? Is it a doable idea?

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2: Re: XoWiki - standardized user interface / document views question/request (response to 1)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 01/27/06 06:54 PM
a simple and very powerful approach is to use categories for this. define or reuse a category tree, map it to xowiki, and assign the categories to the pages. Then write/use a plugin for xowiki to display the categories and embed it in the page.

i have just now committed into cvs head a slightly updated version of xowiki with a small plugin to do such. this can be easily used for realizing a table of contents. Include the plugin in a wiki page like with

{{adp portlets/categories {name {Table of Contents}}}}
and you will get e.g. a view like the following:
http://media.wu-wien.ac.at/download/xowiki-doc/categories.png

by using block-markers the table of contents could be set e.g. into a sidebar.

categories can be used certainly as well for multidimensional mappings, it would be neat to think about tagging in this context etc.

hope this helps

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3: Re: XoWiki - standardized user interface / document views question/request (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 01/27/06 07:44 PM
I added it to view.adp so it will appear as navigation all the time in xowiki.

<include src="/packages/xowiki/www/portlets/categories" &__including_page=page name="@title@">

This seems to work pretty well. I am just adjusting the layou t now.

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4: Re: XoWiki - standardized user interface / document views question/request (response to 3)
Posted by Robert Taylor on 01/27/06 07:49 PM
wow.

what can i say - that looks great already!

gustaf, thank you so much for xowiki and all its capabilities, it really is terrific work. appreciate the thought put into enablind categories, that just makes sense.

dave, nice work, i love the way its turning out. i will take all the pages so far, reorganize them and then categorize our activities for testing purposes.

subsequent to that i'll migrate all the content from the old wiki to xowiki unless someone beats me to it.

superb, i'm thrilled by this.

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5: Re: XoWiki - standardized user interface / document views question/request (response to 1)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 01/27/06 08:22 PM
Dave, nice idea. i am not sure that this should be standard though, since the page templates of xowiki can do it very similar things (current shortcoming: content of template variables can only be inserted via plain text fields). actually, it won't be hard to let an admin specify for what fields what kind of input widget can be used, but i have some other real work to do... it will come sooner or later.

It is nice see that some little work can make people happy.

The original code listed all catagories from all trees in a long page, which is not optimal. i have now updated the category plugin in CVS to handle multiple category trees. one can now specify "tree_name" as a parameter (see below) to display only the wanted trees (the value is a match pattern). if "no_tree_name" is set, the tree_name is not displayed.

This is a repository with many nice examples of XoWiki pages.
>left-col<<
{{adp portlets/categories {name {Table of Contents} tree_name *toc*}}}
><<
>right-col<<
{{adp portlets/categories {name {Table of Contents} tree_name Purpose}}}
><<
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6: Re: Re: XoWiki - standardized user interface / document views question/request (response to 5)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 01/27/06 08:27 PM
Forgot to mention: here are now tow category tries displayed, "xowiki-toc" and "Purpose". see screen shot:
http://media.wu-wien.ac.at/download/xowiki-doc/2categories.png
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7: Re: XoWiki - standardized user interface / document views question/request (response to 6)
Posted by Robert Taylor on 01/28/06 11:05 AM
very cool.

indeed, it doesn't haveto be standard. one discussion i had pointed out that perhaps xowiki should just be a plain wiki by default, and only enable this feature from the admin section for the package.

either way, this is looking great. i hope dave can figure out how to change the front page of xowiki to something a little more 'reader friendly' so that we don't have all the pages crowding that view.

on the front page i would like to try and recreate the content from the home page on openacs.org to see how far we can take the 'presentation' capabilities.

any thoughts gustaf?

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8: Re: XoWiki - standardized user interface / document views question/request (response to 6)
Posted by Robert Taylor on 01/28/06 11:06 AM
gustaf, that screenshot looks great.
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9: Re: Re: XoWiki - standardized user interface / document views question/request (response to 7)
Posted by Robert Taylor on 01/28/06 11:22 AM
never mind, i just saw your post in the feature request section on the wiki regarding this topic.

can't wait to see that.

this wiki is turning out to be very powerfull indeed.

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10: Re: XoWiki - standardized user interface / document views question/request (response to 1)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 01/29/06 12:51 AM
there is an updated version of xowiki and xotcl-core in the cvs. xowiki has a new page type ::xowiki::Object, which might be used for variuos neat things in the future. For editing a xowiki instance, admin permissions for the content folder are required. For the time being, one can set the variable index_page like in
set index_page en:index
to load the wikipage en:index whenever .../xowiki/ is called. Once the index_page is set, the (improved) admin pages .../xowiki/admin/ can be used for browsing all pages etc. so, there is no need to list all pages on default when "entering" the directory.

Eventually, the xowiki::Object should get a more polished user interface, but for now these objects are very powerful and flexible for various purposes.