AdvancedCategorySystem:Wikka

Proposal for an Advanced Category System

How categories work now

Right now the information to which categories a page belongs is stored inside the page itself.
This leads to some problems:

Adding or removing a page to/from a category requires a page edit (minor problem)

Mentioning a category in a page which is not part of that category is difficult (major problem)

Moving a subcategory requires 2 page edits (minor problem)

Renaming a category requires n page edits, where n is the number of pages in that category (major problem)

(There might be more, feel free to add them.)

Possible solution

Move the information about categories out of the pages and store them in 2 seperate tables, one for the categories and their hierarchy, one for the relations between pages and categories.

The categories can be modelled as a tree. (This allows a non-hierarchical system too by simply placing all categories directly under the root node of the tree and hiding the root node itself from beeing displayed).
Since most of the time information about categories is read and only seldom written, Nested Sets are a good way to map our category tree to the mysql database. (See http://www.intelligententerprise.com/001020/celko.jhtml?_requestid=1266295 (english) or http://www.develnet.org/36.html (german) for details on how nested sets work).

Relationship between categories and pages

One category can have 0 to n pages, so the most simple way is a table with two 'foreign keys', with each entry mapping a page(-version) to a category-id (so you can simply rename a category).
One page can belong to 0 to n categories (explicit; I would prefer 1 to n categories, with the root category beeing implicit if no other category is specified for a page)

Problems here

Deleting/moving a category or a subtree produces high load on the database. For trees with less than 100 nodes on halfway decent servers it should be done in less than 1 second tho, most propably in less than 0.1 second - and I doubt someone would want more than 100 categories

a lot of wikka code has to be modified to fit the new system (see below)

Which parts of wikka need to be modified

the edit handler needs to be adjusted so you can easily set/change the categories a page belongs to

a new action to manage the category hierarchy is needed (I am working on this right now)

the category action needs to be re-written (most of the code can be taken from the management-action tho; I am even thinking of completly integrating the functionality there)

header and/or footer actions should be adjusted to show the category of the current page (or, which I would like even better, show a breadcrumb navigation)

Extras possible with the new system

With the new system it would be possible to handle ACLs more easily (and add inheritance to the ACL system). In my development version for each category I store ACLs as well (the fields can be NULL). My plan is as follows:

From all categories a page belongs to, one (and only one) can be marked as the "main parent"

If a page has no page-specific ACLs assigned it will inherit the ACLs of its main parent

If the main parent has no ACLs assigned it will inherit them (recursivly) from their parent

If the root category has no ACLs assigned the default ACLs from wikka.config.php will be used.

Now if you have a set of pages that should only be edited by certain users, for example official documentation to your software, simply create a category, assign ACLs to that category and add the set of pages to it (the category management action will allow to add/remove a group of pages to/from a category in 1, maybe 2 steps).

When will this all be available

I hope to get this done within the next week, maybe two, but I can not promise anything. I will update this page whenever I have news.

State of the code

Right now approximately 20% of the code are working.

CategoryUserContributions

Wikka : AdvancedCategorySystem