[Schematics-development] Going live

[Anton v. S. <an...@ap...>]

> > I think so too. The SeedPosting[1] period seems has
> > so far been surprisingly painless...
>
> Interesting bunch of links!  It will be interesting to
> see how the Cookbook scales, once it goes "live".

Speaking of which: I was thinking of a hackish quick fix to make the
RecipeIndex into a good enough automatic TOC to go live with.

This past weekend, I fixed RecipeIndex so that it shows chapter and recipe
titles instead of just their wiki names.  It now lacks to main features, one
fairly important and one less so:

* Ordering of recipes.  Currently, it orders chapters by their topic name,
and recipes in reverse TopicType order.  This isn't quite good enough: for
example, the Getting Started chapter appears halfway through the list.
TWiki queries aren't clever enough to be able to use the NextTopic field in
the CookbookForm (I was planning to use that in the more comprehensive
Scheme-based TOC solution).

* Two-level limit.  The search query used by RecipeIndex is limited to two
levels: chapters, and their direct children (sections, recipes etc.)  This
isn't a particularly serious limitation given the current cookbook content,
though.

Since the two-level limit is probably acceptable for now, dealing with
ordering should give us a good enough auto-TOC.  The quick fix I have in
mind is to add a TopicOrder field to the CookbookForm (this would supersede
NextTopic).  TopicOrder would contain a value which would be used to order
topics.  This would have to work a lot like old BASIC, where you have to
leave space between your numbers to be able to insert items without
renumbering - not ideal, but I think it'll be workable for our purposes,
until we have a better solution.

Not every topic would need a TopicOrder value - only those where the order
is important.  Topics like "Introduction" sections, for example, could get a
0 or 1.

If there are no objections to this rather retro and obviously flawed system,
I'll go ahead and set it up in the next few days.  Given that, I think we
could consider going live after some of the site housekeeping issues are
taken care of (which shouldn't take very long).

Anton