Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] Rules idea

[Shaun M. <sh...@ae...>]

On 2 Dec 2004, at 17:12, Wendall Cada wrote:

> 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.

That's a good point. Since you can have multiple categories on the page  
that could be a nightmare. I'm not sure how the current category hacks  
work exactly. See  
http://www.phpwebsitemanual.com/index.php? 
module=announce&ANN_user_op=view&ANN_id=181 for the menuman hack. I've  
not used it myself as it interfered with my pagemaster menu hack. ;-)


> 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.
>

Yep, I alluded to it being part of layout in the first post but then  
thought it might be useful at a finer grained level than at a block  
level.

One thought I had was that when you've got the layout panel switched  
on, as well as being able to change the box style and position, you'd  
be able to change the rules for that block directly in situ if it was  
entirely at the layout level. That'd be nice and easy to visually  
modify the sites rules rather than from inside each modules admin page.


Shaun
aegis design - http://www.aegisdesign.co.uk