[thesite] Usability / Architecture Center

[rudy]

> I thought we were going to eventually make it possible to
> assign articles to more than one category at a time.
> How would such a thing work? Can it work now?

hey marlene, what's cookin?  how were the holidays?

okay, as to the multiple categories...

this capability has been part of the database for quite some time

at present, there are really only two places that a category comes into
play on the evolt site

one is the dropdown list, and the other is in association with the
article -- both on the home page and on the article display page -- the
article's category is listed at left under the date

when you "go" to one of the categories using the dropdown list, you get an
index page very similar to the home page, listing all the articles in that
category, and again, albeit somewhat redundantly, the category is listed at
the left under the date

okay right now all the queries work on a one-to-many relationship from
category to article, which means that each article contains a foreign key
to the category that it "belongs" to

this is also called the "main" category, assuming we want articles to
belong to more than one category

(as an aside, putting the article's category as part of the url is totally
redundant -- the category is ostensibly used so that the dropdown list is
positioned on the category of the shown article, but since the foreign key
is part of the article, it can be gotten from the article and not the
url.... at least, assuming i understand why the heck the category id is
part of the url)

the many-to-many category-article relationship is in fact built into the
database, except we just haven't utilized it yet

the key questions to answer are

~ do we really need it?

~ how do we show an article's multiple categories on, say, the home page?
stack them up under the date?  what good would that do for the site
visitor?  what if there's too many of them?

~ when you "go" to a category, should articles be included in the index
page if they have that category not as the "main" category but as one of
the secondary ones?

~ what does it really mean that an article is in more than one category?
would a site visitor be confused by seeing the same article listed in the
Code and the Backend categories?


as far as your other question is concerned,

> In the meantime, could we put up redirects for moved articles?

this won't really work, because the articles aren't actually moving
anywhere, they would just have a different url -- so maybe you were
suggesting we somehow keep track of the old urls, well that would require a
new table and a lot more maintenance...


thanks for the questions, marlene

keep them coming


rudy