[Tikiwiki-devel] Perspectives and common categories

[Jonny B. <Jo...@ti...>]

Hi all again!

There seems to be an issue involving common categories with category jail-root and perspectives that is causing problems on at least one site i am involved in.

Consider the following example educational scenario:

Three perspectives for departments:

    Physics
    Chemistry
    Biology

and a category structure thus:

    Department
        Physics
        Chemistry
        Biology

    Type
        Course notes
        Social info
        etc...

Each perspective has it's jail-root set to the relevant Department category, and the objects (let's stick to wiki pages) will either be categorised in one or more of these cats, and one of the common Types cats. (e.g. the Chemistry and Biology Appreciation Club page would be: Chemistry, Biology, Social info)

Currently, if you add the common categories to the jail roots, then all the material is shared between the perspectives, if not, then listing one of the Types, say Course notes, brings up the pages for all three perspectives (or none at all, depending on object type). Also, if someone in a department perspective edits and saves a page, it will no longer be categorised as Course notes.

The work-around for this seems to be to triplicate the common categories under each department category:

    Department
        Physics
            Type for Physics
                Course notes for Physics
                Social info for Physics
                etc...
        Chemistry
            Type for Chemistry
                Course notes for Chemistry
                Social info for Chemistry
                etc...
        Biology
            Type for Biology
                Course notes for Biology
                Social info for Biology
                etc...

which with a few more perspectives and lots more common categories (draft/final, staff/pupil, 2010/2011 etc etc) soon balloons into an awful lot of categories, making maintenance painful and server performance poor (especially for trackers).

Maybe i've misunderstood how this should work, and there's a better way to organise it (we've tried a few) but i think the underlying mechanism needs to be changed to allow this. Either to allow non-jail-rooted categories to be searched (and re-saved), as long as they are _also_ categorised in one of the relevant jail-root cats, or introduce some sort of common-jail thing (hopefully not).

Any thoughts? Sorry for the long mail...

jonny