ATTN: Website Designers! Looking for some advice please

[NSX Prime]

Re: Hey web guys - Anyone use Drupal?

I may be misunderstanding your question, but doesn't the parent/child/grandchild relationship between pages take care of this? Or maybe a combination of categories and parent/children?

Looking at the current wiki, those 8 main "categories" (learning, sharing, purchasing, etc.) would be the parents and everything else would come below them.

Or, those could be actual Categories and then you save the parent/child stuff for the detail pages? Example - /Acura/Contact, or /sales-production/model-information

This feature had escaped me until you pointed it out. I had looked for options like that under Posts, but I'm not used to thinking about different content types behaving differently so I didn't look carefully at the options under Pages. I blame too much time spent in MediaWiki wherever everything is the same... (hey, it sounds better than just being dumb!)

Thanks very much for pointing it out! I will play with it in the coming week.

Do you have a "gut feeling" recommendation between your two ideas of either using parent/sub pages for the whole thing or starting with Categories and building out the parent/sub pages under categories?

Granted, with well over 1,000 pages of content to import I would think the tricky part is importing everything properly.

The amount of content is the reason I want to make sure I have everything right BEFORE I start migrating it! I certainly don't want to realize I didn't structure it the right way and end up having to do it again.

 

[NSX Prime]

Re: Hey web guys - Anyone use Drupal?

Are you trying to suck the wiki into WP? If anything I would leave wiki separate and just modify the look to watch the WP pages. I'm not sure if I fully understand what you're looking for out of the navigation portion, feel free to shoot me an email if you want to chat about it offline.

I really don't want to maintain both MediaWiki and WP. I am after as integrated a solution as I can reasonably implement.

After reading Budweiser's post, it appears I was just overlooking something so obvious in WP that you guys probably just didn't understand what kind of plugin I was looking for since the functionality appears to be built in!

I'd also be interested in your opinion re: the parent/sub pages or categories at the top level (see my "gut feeling" question in the post above).

 

[NetViper]

Re: Hey web guys - Anyone use Drupal?

I really don't want to maintain both MediaWiki and WP. I am after as integrated a solution as I can reasonably implement.

After reading Budweiser's post, it appears I was just overlooking something so obvious in WP that you guys probably just didn't understand what kind of plugin I was looking for since the functionality appears to be built in!

I'd also be interested in your opinion re: the parent/sub pages or categories at the top level (see my "gut feeling" question in the post above).

For Any pages I do Parent Page and Sub Category.

For a Wiki if you used pages you could have:

Wiki -> Performance
Wiki -> Number of Cars

etc
etc

You could go deeper like
Wiki -> Performance -> headers

You can build out specific menus for each. The WP menu system is very nice.

Of course you can put the TAGS in each also.

I only use posts for Blogs.

 

[NSX2398]

I won't pretend to be a Wiki expert .. although I'm probably the one most responsible for it's current implementation structure. At the time I built the prototype structure, I had only limited knowledge from some reading ..and no practical experience so there may be better ways of doing it.

The current structure is largely built as pages and although there are some categories, most of which were created before I started. In looking back I don't think they serve a useful purpose and I'd probably eliminate them as they are primarily (I think) useful for grouping content .. but I was never able to get them to enhance the navigation. So, I controlled the navigation essentially by hiperlinking to the appropriate page. This allowed me to easily change the structure at any time after the fact without needing to move pages from one category to another.

The only possible benefit I can see in the Wiki would be to make the DIY a category so that if I put a DIY topic in the Modifying section, I could just put the category tag in at the end of it and it would automatically appear in the DIY section as well. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out a way to organize these items that appears in the DIY section .. which winds up making that section disorganized and hard to find things other than in alphabetical order.

Lud is also aware of another Wiki-based project that I've been working on and without revealing details, it lends itself much more to the productive use of Categories .. although maybe only for two levels max. But it too relies on some amount of hiperlinks for navigation depending on your entry point.

I'll leave it up to Lud to decide but my vote would be that a structure that relies on Categories is going to make the navigation much more difficult to organize.

 

[Budweiser®]

Re: Hey web guys - Anyone use Drupal?

This feature had escaped me until you pointed it out. I had looked for options like that under Posts, but I'm not used to thinking about different content types behaving differently so I didn't look carefully at the options under Pages. I blame too much time spent in MediaWiki wherever everything is the same... (hey, it sounds better than just being dumb!)

Thanks very much for pointing it out! I will play with it in the coming week.

Do you have a "gut feeling" recommendation between your two ideas of either using parent/sub pages for the whole thing or starting with Categories and building out the parent/sub pages under categories?



The amount of content is the reason I want to make sure I have everything right BEFORE I start migrating it! I certainly don't want to realize I didn't structure it the right way and end up having to do it again.

Let me correct my previous statement. Wordpress by default doesn't allow for usage of Categories with Pages, they're reserved for Posts since posts have no hierarchy to associate them with other posts. Same thing with Tags.

That said, you can add Tags and Categories to Pages by adding a few lines of code, shown here.

Now, Wordpress's vision for Pages is that they're associated with each other purely by hierarchy. In your particular situation the 8 main Categories on the current Wiki could just be higher up in the hierarchy. For example:

nsxprime.com/wiki/learning/acura/contacting-acura
nsxprime.com/wiki/learning/sales-production/model-information​

So if you were to go without Categories your URLs would be somewhat similar to the above. The nice part about this is that you can use somewhat generic functions in page templates that will call "all children" or "all children and sub children" and the hierarchy logic defines what will be displayed. Since you have so many pages of content this will allow you to create a handful of templates to cover thousands of pages.

Some downsides are long URLs, and potentially managing nesting may have a small learning curve. I haven't used MediaWiki so I can't comment on one vs. another, but the Pages listing in the WP Admin is really logical and has a search feature, which comes in handy with large numbers of pages.

NSX2398's comment about DIY is an example where adding Categories and/or Tags may be useful. Do you have a test server set up to play around with?

 

[Budweiser®]

Any updates on this?