Re: Add category ordering, remove sub-categories in Roller 5.1?

[Dave <sn...@gmail.com>]

+1 on removing hierarchical categories.

I don't know of any Roller blogs that use hierarchical categories.

- Dave



On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 9:15 AM, Glen Mazza <gl...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Team (and all others), I'm working on updating my blog to using Roller
> 5.1 on OpenShift: http://web-gmazza.rhcloud.com/blog/. One problem that's
> popped up is that there seems to be no defined ordering of blog categories.
>  I would like to have "Web Services" --> "Java" --> "Tech" --> "Misc"
> displayed in that order but the ordering appears to be completely random.
>  If I try to rename categories to get them in the desired ordering, or if I
> delete categories and add them in again in the hopes they will be placed in
> the desired location (or at least at the top or the bottom of the list),
> they still get inserted in the category list at random locations.
>
> This problem has existed for some time (https://issues.apache.org/
> jira/browse/ROL-1166), but may be getting worse due to the result of the
> switch from OpenJPA (which may have internally assured that new items would
> always be kept at the end) to EclipseLink.  However, the underlying
> weblogcategory table has no ordering column so there seems to be nothing
> that we can formally rely on to ensure proper ordering.  Anybody know
> otherwise?  If not, I'd like to make the following changes in Roller 5.1:
>
> 1.) Add a new "ordering" column to the weblogcategory table. Similar to
> priority in the bookmark table, it would be a numeric indicator of the
> relative ordering of the category with respect to the others.  Until the
> user interface is updated to allow for moving categories up and down, new
> categories will always be placed at the bottom of the list, allowing a user
> to get his desired category ordering by the way he enters in new categories.
>
> As part of migration from earlier Roller versions, the "ordering" could be
> null (so, random as before) until a category change is made, and then
> numbers assigned based on location in the category list.
>
> 2.) As part of #1, I'd like to eliminate sub-categories from the
> weblogcategory table.  They're seldom used (I don't know of any blog,
> Roller or otherwise, that has them today), unsupported by most if not all
> Roller themes, don't work the way people would like[1], and their use case
> is usually met today by using blog entry tags, multiple blogs or a Wiki
> instead.  The idea of subcategories is that I can have "Finance", "Sports",
> and "Travel" as main categories, "Asian Markets", "European Markets", "USA
> Market", "NHL", "NBA", "NFL", etc., as subcategories, but anybody blogging
> so extensively to need subcategories is probably going to have create
> separate and specialized Finance, Sports, and Travel blogs anyway.
>
> As part of migration from earlier Roller versions, either the parentID
> column from weblogcategory table will be removed/ignored, making all blog
> categories top-level, or similarly the parentID column for each category
> will be set to the "root" category and just the UI changed to no longer
> support subcategories.
>
> WDYT?
>
> Regards,
> Glen
>
> [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ROL-1593,
> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ROL-1252
>