Re: [Phpwiki-talk] how to use categories?

[Adam S. <ad...@pe...>]

> While looking for documentation on the phpwiki site I noticed that there
> seems to be a concept of categories - how do I use these? How do I
> create one, and how do I add pages to a category? Is there a standard
> way to get a list of all categories? And from what version on does this
> work? Thanks!

Hey Roel,

Categories are just just another wikipage.  However by using them in a
certain way you can take advantage of a wiki's features to automatically
document and categorize your pages.

The standard "wiki way" of adding a page to a category is to put:

----
CategoryWhatever

at the bottom of the page where "Whatever" is the name of the category
that it belongs to.  Now when you go to the CategoryWhatever page it
does a full text search for all pages which belong to CategoryWhatever. 
Typically the Category* pages belong to a category called
CategoryCategory which will list all the known category pages for you.

Make sense?

There are some minor alternatives.  My favorite is to take advantage of
InterWiki links and mark pages as belonging to categories by having a
link at the bottom of a page like this:

----
Category:Whatever

the advantage of that is that it stops the CategoryWhatever page from
referencing pages which mention CategoryWhatever without actually
belonging to it.

The only problem is that the current backlinks method doesn't work on
the CategoryWhatever page because there isn't a page called
Category:Whatever and the FullTextSearch displays all the matching lines
from the page which makes for a rather cluttered display.

The solution would to either allow the BackLinks plugin to accept an
arbitrary page name to search for or to have an option to the
FullTextSearch to only return matching page names, not page contents. 
Neither should be hard to do but I haven't gotten to either of them yet.

Adasm.