[thesite] Usability / Architecture Center

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Wed Jan 3 10:33:08 CST 2001


> From: "rudy" <r937 at interlog.com>
[...] 
> 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

ok...

> 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

which i thought was the plan... since some articles really should be 
in 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)

well, i was gonna ask this later, but i'll ask now... why is the 
category part of the URL, especially given that we had planned on 
allowing multiple categories per article?  as far as i'm concerned, it 
should only ever be the article ID in the URL, since that will not 
change...

> 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?

i think so, unless it's gonna be a bitch to maintain...

> ~ 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?

i think the design can account for them, as a comma-separated list 
or something... at least if i recall correctly, that's how i planned it...

> ~ 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?

yes... because we aren't assigning weight to the categories a user 
chooses... for instance, i think an article is both visual design and 
code, so it gets listed in both because i have no way of saying 
primary, nor should i... i don't see a reason, at least, to have 
primary vs. secondary as opposed to multiple...

> ~ 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?

i very highly doubt that... if anything, it gives more exposure to 
articles, and visitors who see an article listed in code with a listing 
of backend under the category section as well (that's why we show 
category on the category page, for more than one category) know it 
can apply to more...

> 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...

i don't think the catid should be part of the URL... that alone should 
alleviate that...




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