Geeklog Forums

Has anyone investigated the work involved (or better yet, done the work) to allow a user to choose multiple categories for an article?

For example, I want a category called 'Funny', one called 'Geek', one called 'News', and then i can repost articles that I find interesting as both 'geek' and 'news' or post a geek joke as 'funny' and 'geek', etc.

Many other blogs and cms systems do this, I'm surprised I don't see the functionality in GL 1.3.x or 1.4.x. I've been an avid user of GeekLog for quite a while now, and love everything else about GeekLog, so I'd rather not have to go through the work of moving hundreds of articles and setting up tons of redirecting for articles that have been indexed in search engines to move to a totally new URL format from some other CMS, y'know?

Thanks,
ian

Could you name some to study them? Up to now I thought one would have to copy the article. Don`t you think that people ust the search?

> name some

WordPress immediately comes to mind since my wife uses it for her blog. Nucleus has a plug-in for it, and I've seen others that offer the functionality either built into the code or through a plugin/extension to the software.

It's just more convenient for users to see that a particular article has a set of topics associated, and let them click on a topic to see other articles that match. I just don't want to have to make like 100 topics like
- general humor
- geek humor
- funny news
- geek news
- etc
- etc
... if I can just define the core set of topics like "Geek", "News","Humor" and choose the multiple topics whenever I post an article.

While I personally agree that this would be a good feature I looked at several demos at OpenSource CMS and didn't find one that offered multiple categories for a story. Now I didn't check everything listed, but I hit some of the ones I was more familular with like Drupal, Civic Space, e107, Postnuke, and PHP-Nuke. So Wordpress still looks like the only hard example so far.

Just because I could find another example doesn't mean it's not a good idea, just that maybe Geeklog would be leading the way if this feature were an option.

---

~Mark

Well, everybody has his needs and I don`t think that they are necessarily helpful for others but sometimes they are.

E.g. I now have the word Permalink in my stories or also say the name of the topic in each story so that when they are mixed on the front page people find it easier to see more of the topic.

As far as I remember wordpress does not have a good search. Maybe that is why you expect people to orient along topics / categories?

Personally I`d feel annoyed if I find out someone copied stories and I am reading the same stuff all over again. It would also be silly to find the same stories in "search". It would really not be my choice.

I would find this feature very valuable. I am building a site for a dance club. All the members are older and not exaclty what you would call "technically oriented". None of them will use the search. In fact it would be better if it weren't even there.

So to keep every body infomed and make sure the articles are being read, you have to make sure it appears in the topic that they will read. For example, an article about volunteer training for the Easter Convention should be easy to find under the Easter Convention. We need to recruit people to work as volunteers and if we don't advertise it in the Easter Convention topic, a lot of people will miss it. But we also have people looking for volunteer opportunities. If we don't have it in the Volunteer topic, our regular core of volunteers won't be informed.

I could find many other uses for this with my customers. Not everybody is a geek. Some people just want to go right to the topic and read what's new.

Having done several hundred sites for small business and "low tech" people I can tell you from experience that the search box is useless.

I think we sometimes forget that the majority of people who are potential users are not very sophisticated. They come to a page and want to go straight to what they are interested in. Making a career out of searching for things is not in their makeup. You lose them fast if everything isn't obvious, and even redundant.

I could find a lot of applications for this, if anyone makes it possible, I would be interested.

---

webeddy

This is certainly right and there are few more points where I `d say that GL need improvement in this regard.

- E.g. when you fist log in you should be directed to the user "preferences". Only there you notice that you can subscribe stories.

Maybe there should be such a nice sign on the top of the topics like in the forum plugin "subscribe this forum / thread" -> subscribe this topic.


This is just one more idea and maybe we can gather some more?

I know this already an outstanding feature request; having topics and subtopics. If you can have an unlimited number of subtopics then you can approximate a story being in multiple topics. The question becomes, which is easier to code? After which the question is who is willing to code it?

-Rob

Just one more thought on that. Before having topics and subtopics it would probably be useful to be able to change the topic ID and that means more and more is to be coded.

So that`s why I suggested a simple alternative. What do you think, should this be a feature request?

1)
A user logging in for the first time or first time after the topics have been changed should be redurected to "preferences" plus a message box opens giving a hint like "please check your email subscriptions."

2)
On each story next to the print and email icon there should be a subscription button "subscribe this topic". It could just lead to "preferences".

You can edit the topic ID already. But this hack would be one of the greatest features Geeklog is missing, and is the only reason i sometimes switch to another CMS. But it should be possible to choose for:

a) assign an story to multiple topics

or

b) assign multiple subtopics to a topic.

I guess it would become too difficult and not very logical to have both options at the same time.

---

Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

Actually, Joomla and Drupal both allow for posting a story to multiple topics too. In fact, Drupal makes a big deal over its "Taxonomy". Geeklog 2 is supposed to have this feature, but there is no time table for GL2 production release. I suspect others like me, have out grown the flat hierarchy of GL topics. I've actually researched adding mulitple categories (topics) and sub-categories to GL, but its a pain to upgrade GL with custom hacks. I have decided against hacking GL since that same effort or less could be spent in migrating to a CMS that has these kind of features.

I have looked at both Joomla and Drupal and have successfully imported my site using php/MySQL. The only thing stopping me from switching to Joomla is that Joomla 1.5 is supposed to be right around the corner. Joomla 1.5 or Joomla 2.0, not sure what they are gonna call it since its a total refactor. I don't want to waste time on Joomla 1.0.X.

I would switch to Drupal today if phpBB3 was at least at an RC level. The latest release of Drupal, 4.7, has many features, but Drupal is kinda hard to grasp, even with documentation. In many ways GL2 will be the equivalent of Drupal.

Joomla 1.5 lacks granular security or "roles" as they are called in Drupal. Also Joomla does not have the "add a block" feature like Geeklog or Drupal. Every hack in Joomla needs to be a plugin or module, but they are very easy to code. Joomla also has an installer for these things.

Would like to bump this. I am pining away for multiple categories! Or even a tag function like Xanga is now using.

The administration of Geeklog and the ease of adding articles and giving permissions is so much simpler than Drupal, Joomla, Mambo and some of the more popular cms systems that I prefer geeklog. From a user standpoint, my clients find Drupal, Joomla and Mambo completely unintelligble unless I redesign the admin for them to make it simpler. I don't have that problem with Geeklog. But without the multiple categories, I am forced to offer WordPress to my clients as well. I just don't have time to continually monitor and learn to manipulate multiple solutions or learn new ones. It's hard enough to keep up with Geeklog and WordPress. I'd love to settle on one, but without being able to specify multiple categories, Geeklog just doesn't have as much utility for the majority of my clients. Right now, in my opinion, Geeklog is a pretty good blog, but not a great content management system. If you can't manage which categories you put the content in, it doesn't manage content very well.

Yep, you're damn right. Managing categories/topics should be a core feature of every CMS. But I assume we can only dream of this in Geeklog 1.40 etc, we'll have to wait for version 2.0, or in the meantime switch to a 'real' CMS.

---

Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

Just asking .. but what is the core feature thats missing - is it the ability to have a menu presented to the site users with categories(topics) and sub-categories(sub-topics). If you could present that structure to the users but still only have a 1-level topic structure for creating the content - would that meet some of your needs?

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

That might do it. I'll explain my problem in a little more depth. Maybe that will help you see what we're getting at. Maybe I just don't know enough about the core features and there is nothing missing, I just don't know how to implement it.

Take a look at this site http://seattlewcswing.org which is a really good example of how not being able to organize is really confusing and leads to lots of cluttered menus and inefficient search results.

There is a lot of information on competitions, both news and static pages plus events. There is a link in the news block, plus a competition information block with three links in it. There are also events in the calendar, which have to do with competitions.

There is also a lot of overlap between tickets available, Easter Swing, and conventions and the calendar.

Using the search box is good if you can get the users to use the search function and they understand what they are looking at in the results. In an especially large site you are going to get so many results that unless you are very careful how you write your titles, someone is going to have to read all the entries to find what they want. (Kind of like finding something in a forum And site visitors will get bored or irritated because they can't just go directly to what they want.

With various people administering sections and changing administrators in a volunteer organization, the site gets pretty bloated, really fast. So if you are the master administrator, and you have to keep certain information always availble for new visitors and the "unlearned" amongst us there is no way (right now) to organize this and present it.

The problem gets tougher when, for instance, the Ticket Coordinator writes an article under Tickets Available, and it really should be in Easter Swing and it should also be in the Conventions section. Or the Easter Swing Co-ordinator announces tickets available. Either that person is forced to make a choice of which section to put it in, or to write three different articles. Or the person who is doing overall administration has to make the choice when it's moderated.

The club dictated what categories they wanted. It seems that we should be able to fit everything in. Subcategories would be a big help.

A dynamic menu plugin would help but not address all of what you want like assigning content to more then 1 category. The glMenu plugin would let you administrate a menu block and create a site directory that could link to topics or staticpages. That should address some of your needs.

---

Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

Put it up for a bounty. Maybe it will get done.

Out of curiosity, how many topics does you client site have? 10? 20?

- thought 1
I had always had in mind to answer this old thread because ByteEnable gave me the impression that Joomla would be so much advanced and preferable. In actual fact I`m about to kill the last Mambo installation and replace it with Geeklog because:



- thought 2
Sometimes a better overview can be achieved with graphics or simply reducing the offer. I tried that on my site www.hallomarkus.de The reduced horizontal menu marking the active topic helps a lot, more than the left menu.

-> If there are plans to support submenus, then there must be a better navigation too.

Perhaps somebody could upgrade Janetta's Blockmenu plugin, wich offers some nice options. And the tagging plugin (not ready yet, see the bounties/ thread) will make it possible to post an article to multiple tags without changing the core code of the topic assignment etc.