Web Groups

Ways to structure the information

Anticipating the growth in number of webs in the TWiki site I am setting up, I was toying with ways to structure the information. One could be to go into the direction of HierarchicalNavigation, but actually there may be a more KISS solution: Web Groups

The idea would be that each Web will have an associated list of webs (A Wiki Variable), the Web Group (or the set of related Webs). Basically the set of webs somebody in the Web "foo" would be interested in.

This way one would be free to organize the relationship to fit best practice. This may imply some more manual editing when adding new webs, but I think the flexibility gained is worth it.

For implementation, I see the following issues:

• each web pref has a variable holding the Web Group list for top right banner (easy)
• an item to search in all Web Group (in addition to all) in the Search option menu (easy, perl code should handle this)
• be able to see Changes in the Web Group (not separated by webs, but globally sorted by date (some perl to do)

As for ergonomics, if you look at it, a lot of "general public" web sites are patterned this way, so I think this would help novice navigation as well as being efficient for the power user. If you go to a well-known e-bookstore, you will see:

If you trim things a bit, it begins to look like our fammiliar TWiki banner...

And you recognize things, and Web Group to the right...

-- ColasNahaboo - 12 Apr 2001

Improve Searching

I tried to file my own idea and found that the name was already in use. So I'm appending:

Motivation:

The current Advanced Search mechanism provides a choice of one (current) web or "All public webs". But there's no easy way to say "search these N webs.

Description:

1. It would be nice to have an easy way to choose which webs t search. 2. In a large installaion, this can get unweildy and, besides, some webs go together better than others 3. The ability to create WebGroups would help with sort and other possibilities. 4. Do it like groups of Users

e.g. on Tiki.org, we could group TWiki, TWiki01, ... TWiki04x02 together. We might group Codev, Support, and Bugs into a group. I think you can see where this could go.

-- VickiBrown - 21 Feb 2008

Wow, an old topic resurrected from 2001!

The WebSearch has an embedded SEARCH. VarSEARCH has a webs="" parameter that accepts a comma-space delimited list of webs. That is. you could create a web group as a preferences setting, such as: Set DOCWEBS = TWiki, TWiki01, TWiki02, TWiki03, TWiki04, TWiki04x01, TWiki04x02, and use it as webs="%DOCWEBS%" in a SEARCH.

-- PeterThoeny - 25 Feb 2008