Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] Rules idea

[Wendall C. <wen...@to...>]

One other item I wanted to discuss is category. I haven't added category
placement for on major reason. 

What do I base the category from? The Web Pages item? The Article
Manager Article? If any item on the page is in that category? I'm
assuming you mean if any item on the page is in that category. I just
don't know how realistic this would be to do though without a lot of
thought going into the design. Unless it is done properly, the amount of
database queries to check categories would be insane. It's almost a
catch-22. The list of categories for every item sent to layout would
need to be available before the items were generated for layout on the
page. I'm not certain how you'd achieve this effectively. My current
method checks the current module in the $_REQUEST var against each items
setting. It does the same for webpages. Checks the $_REQUEST var to see
if a page has been requested and generates a block or body element. This
is a very weak method. It would be much stronger if, as I think Shawn is
suggesting. There was a table or set of tables for Layout to check for
advanced layout and automagically fetched the items from all mods. This
could even further reduce the impact of inc/runtime.php to mostly be
used for module administrative tasks, lists and item views. As it is,
there could be a ton of overhead processing each inc/runtime.php if they
are all banging against the database to retrieve settings for dynamic
placement.

Wendall

On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 08:38 -0800, Wendall Cada wrote:
> Shaun,
> 
> This is a great idea. I can code the concept into phpwsRSSFeeds for now
> as a demo. I agree that there needs to be methods for doing this
> consistently across the board. I think the way it is done should be
> planned and not an afterthought for certain. Maybe we could create a
> register table for item placement. So there is just one query to the
> database per page view to determine placement of items for all modules.
> 
> Wendall
> 
> On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 04:16 +0000, Shaun Murray wrote:
> > This is an idea that's been kicking about my head for a while so I 
> > thought I'd let it out there.
> > 
> > Currently, some modules allow you to display a block, menu or other 
> > element if another module is on the screen. eg. you can display a menu 
> > with just the linkman module or a block only with announcements.
> > 
> > Some others, allow you to display an element depending on a pagemaster 
> > page - see phpwsRSSFeeds and kCart.
> > 
> > There are hacks from users to display blocks, menus etc depending on 
> > the category, if the user is an admin and other kinds of permission 
> > levels.
> > 
> > These are mostly hacked on afterwards and the interface is often 
> > different and confusing and mixing all the possible conditions in one 
> > interface isn't always simple. In an effort to homogenise these all 
> > into one interface, and perhaps this will fit in with v1.0.0 
> > permissions too,  I thought perhaps we could use a rule based method. 
> > The inspiration was Apple's Mail filtering rules for those familiar 
> > with the idea.
> > 
> > Here's a non-functioning mockup in html
> > 
> > http://www.aegisdesign.co.uk/examples/rules/
> > 
> > To explain,
> > 
> > This would be displayed instead of the 'Allow View' option in 
> > blockmaker for example. You click 'enable rules' to switch on the rules 
> > otherwise the default is to always display the element. You can add or 
> > remove rules using the -/+ buttons allowing quite a complex set. I've 
> > added some examples for common things you'd maybe filter on. The 
> > multi-select lists have to be generated when the user changes the 
> > filter type - eg. if they select category, it fills the list with 
> > categories, if they select pages, it fills with pagemaster pages.
> > 
> > That's the idea. I can see a couple of problems with it already but 
> > maybe they can be overcome.
> > 
> > 1) selecting a user from a list of a couple of thousand is not viable - 
> > see the Notes module for how that was addressed.
> > 
> > 2) you might want to filter on a text field - eg. pagemaster page where 
> > title begins with/contains 'some text'
> > 
> > 
> > For the core, I'd guess this is some part of layout in that it would 
> > keep a list of elements and if they were rule enabled or not. Or 
> > perhaps this is useful at a module level so that individual content is 
> > rule based also. A table somewhere else stores the rules.
> > 
> > For the module developer, it'd be as simple to add in rules editing to 
> > their module as they can with fatcat now.
> > 
> > 
> > Thoughts anyone?
> > 
> > 
> > Shaun
> > aegis design - http://www.aegisdesign.co.uk
> > 
> > 
> > 
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