Briefing
One of the core information structures at Wikidot is the ability to grant each page a single parent.
A page can have many “children”, but each child has only one parent… it's a great way to assign a unique connection between two pages.
Though Wikidot has a parenthood framework, it lacks a way to organise and render pages by parenthood. The only thing that comes close to doing this is the PageTree module, and all that does is list pages by linked titles (in quite an attractive fashion, I must admit).
Concept
The PageTree module works in a chronological fashion: You select the root page, which lists its children, who in turn list their children, and they in turn list their children… and so on.
It is almost like looking into the future of a page (seeing their children and grandchildren).
When it comes to data organising, we can easily see into a page's future… but when it comes to a page's history — where it came from, what it's directly related to — we can only go as far as identifying the parent page's URL and title.
Proposal
A module that will list each consecutive parent of a page, according to the user's customisation.
[[module Parenthood prependLine="Start of history!" appendLine="End of history" limit="5" perPage="3" separate="false"]]
+ %%title_linked%%
%%content%%
%%tags%%
----
[[/module]]
This would list a page's parent according to the specified layout… then it would list that page's parent, which would list its parent page etc, etc. In the above example, we have posed a limit of 5 parents. We have also put a limit of displaying 3 parents per page.
Variables
Same as the ListPages module
Notes
This concept is only feasible in a backwards direction. It would be extremely difficult to produce this in a forwards direction (a list of children pages, and then their child pages — just as the PageTree module currently does).
This raises several questions:
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Recursive ListPages? What do you mean by that?
ListPages doesn't let you view details about the parent page (i.e. %%parent_content%%, %%parent_tags%%, [[ifparenttags x +y]][[/ifparenttags]])
Yes
If a page was a living thing, then it has to come from a parent. As that parent is a living page, it too would have a parent. You have a family history going on here, which details how the youngest generation came to be.
Similar. I understand the pagepath as an advanced breadcrumb navigation… would that be a correct interpretation?
The ListParent module can list anything about a parent, or it's parent's parent, etc, etc.
The page path is like a tag consisting of a page path (page->page->page->page).
The idea is to allow hierarchical categorisation, exactly the species tree you give as an example. And then to allow us to attach such page paths to objects (pages). Unlike parenting, we'd also want multiple page paths per object for different properties.
Put that aside, I think it's a different thing. Here you want to show the breadcrumbs in more detail, so I think calling it ListParents and making it analogous to ListPages is simple and sufficient.
The module lists up to 'limit' parents of a page in ascending or descending order, formatting a user-specified code template. If limit = 0, it means 'all parents'. I suspect you'd want some additional variables to allow bullet indenting and perhaps styling.
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How would you use this?
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For wiki project, you can render the current page, its parent page, and its parent page… etc, etc. A Parenthood module is very useful for printing, as you can print all relevant pages to a document.
For the Calendar application, have a look at a response page… it doesn't say what its responding to… it only says the title of the page its responding to. A Parenthood module is useful for showing the content of the the event that the person is responding to.
For the Polls application, we are unable to close the voting poll. Each poll option is unable to access its parent's tags. A Parenthood module is useful for deciding whether or not we want to enable voting.
For a database (for example, an organism database), you can list a specie, and its history:
This module would make more use of Wikidot's parenting framework.
What I think would be particularly nice is if this was also tied in to or used to supplant breadcrumbs.
I'm currently designing a site layout that has layers and layers of parents in some cases; the breadcrumb navigation actually wraps onto a second line from all the page titles (which bothers my sense of proper appearance). Some of those pages aren't particularly relevant to the final page in question; for example, consider the start page —> a subject index page —> a map —> a region from the map —> a specific place in the region —> a business at that place. Really only the last three or four levels are relevant to backtracking from the final page, especially when the highest pages are also accessible from sidebar or top-bar menus.
It would be absolutely beautiful if I could cut breadcrumbs off at a particular number of levels (or better yet a specific page, i.e. the 'map' above) for, say, all pages in a given category. Or even just an individual page.
Yes, precisely.
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