Namespaces vs Categories
Development and Programming
I think I’ve finally managed to tame my wiki theme to my liking, so now comes the next big question: how to structure my content.
The data that will be going into the wiki consists of documentation for a game. Said documentation is made up of (at the moment) three distinct groups of content, each with a number of subgroups.
Categories and sub-categories (can you have sub-sub categories too?) would seem the most straight-forward approach to this, but what about namespaces? Would it be an advantage to go with this instead, and then dividing those up into categories? Or maybe you can’t have categories within a namespace?
I think I’ve got a general idea of what categories and namespaces are and what they do, but I guess I haven’t fully wrapped my mind around when you’d use one and when you’d use the other.
Categories nest infinitely.
Namespaces can have access restrictions for admins/usergroups - categories can’t.
Namespaces have to be made in the CP - categories are made by any editor on the fly.
Namespaces aren’t hierarchal.
Those are the main differences I can think of right now….
Hmm, okay, the nesting is a plus for categories. Restrictions … need to ponder whether I’ll end up needing those. It won’t be a wiki where anyone else but me adds content, but I suppose it might be possible that I’ll want to restrict access to some content later on.
If you assign something to a namespace, can it also be in a category?
Yes, of course. If you make a new namespace, you’ll see how the restrictions work.
After some playing around with the wiki, I am starting to realize I probably don’t understand it all that well. 😉
For example, when I want to reate an article within a specific category, if I use [[Category:Article_Name]], then the rendered link is ‘Category: Article_Name’. Can’t you create entries within a category and still have them displayed as ‘Article_Name’?
Also, can you precreate categories? I tried to just go to a page ‘www.domain.com/wiki/Category:INFO/’ and then filled in some text on that page via the edit function, but this doesn’t seem to be listed as a category even so when I click categories.
You’re misunderstanding how to assign categories. The syntax you want is [[Category:Category of Article]] - The first word Category never changes, that’s telling EE to assign the entry to a category. The part after the colon is the name of the category that the current article should exist in.
I’m not sure about the pre-filling categories, they’re created when you assign an article to them - so you could just make a sandbox to do that in to pre-create them if you wish.
Ahh, okay … got that part then, I think.
How about when I need to link to a category or a subcategory within the text of an article? Do I use a regular link then, or can I use some sort of wiki-linking there too?
For example, if the word ‘Administration’ is mentioned in a text, I want to link that to the ‘Administration’ subcategory.
You can still use something like:
View category [[Category:Studies]]But that will put that article into that category. If you want to just link to the category without categorizing the entry, you can use [url=] type syntax, or whatever URL creating syntax your method (ie: textile) uses.
Okay, that’s what I suspected. Just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a shortcut. 😊
By the way, I’m completely wrong above. blushes
The docs show this:
[[:Category:Parent Category::Child Category]]To create a link to your category without categorizing the article you’re linking in.
Oh, doh! I missed the initial colon, that’s why it didn’t work when I tried it. And then I thought I had misunderstood when you said it couldn’t be done. 😊
Thank you for finding that. 😊
Not sure if it will help clarify Namespaces and Categories …
Namespaces are defined in the Control Panel, but are put into effect by the name of the article being associated with them. meaning you have to rename the document and tack the Namespace to the beginning with a colon. such as having a ‘Utah’ namespace and a ‘Capitol City’ article - the name of the article would be ‘Utah:Capitol City’.
Categories are associations. you include in your article the link to the category and the document is automatically associated with that category. if you want a link to the category without the association, prepend a colon to the beginning of the category link. If i wanted my ‘Utah:Capitol City’ article to be in the category ‘States’, i would include the link ‘[ [ Category: States ] ]’ somewhere in the article and the association with that category is automatic.
The benefit to the namespace is so that you can have multiple articles with the same name, but they are unique and defined by the namespace they are in. Using the ‘Capitol City’ example, if we create the 50 states as namespaces, each could have a page titled ‘Capitol City’ and they would all have unique content.
jojo… all you were living here happened to me when I tried defining our Wiki for the first, second and third time… and I still do not know if I will live that “lost feeling” again…
My “reality” is that I wanted to launch a wiki so everyone can share knowledge, but in a structured way… there’s my headache… if the momment someone shares or publish an article and he/she can also create-or-modify a category or subcategory… the structure begins to fall apart… or better said, it is in a never ending dinamic communal structure - where everyone has his/hers own idea of structure… jaja
from all I have read and learned, right now I am thinking of leaving the wiki for sharing knowledge, and give structure to all that sharing inside of “namespaces”… where editors have more control to put every knowledge in its “right position”…