Question

How to Define a CategoryCategory?

Example

CategoryDescription: This is the parent of all Categories and provides help on using them.

A category is a grouping of related topics. A topic is added to a category by writing "Category<category name>" in the RelatedTopics form field - for example, "CategoryEditing". A single topic may be in multiple categories. Even a category can be in a category!

The following topics are part of HowToDefineCategoryCategory in the Support web:     (automatically generated table)

Create New Category

Check above list first to see if there is already a similar category you could use. To create a new category, complete the form below, hit Create (no need to change anything in edit), then Preview and Save.

Category topic:	Replace FooBar with the category name
Description:	Brief summary describing the purpose of the category, giving guidelines as to what should be and what should not be in the category

Note: New category topics are based on TemplateCategory, which in turn INCLUDEs CategoryTopicTemplate.

Answer

This sounds like something I want to implement, but I've read this page and related topics several times and I'm still a little confused. I'm setting up the architecture of my own TWiki site and I need to have categories within a web. I don't want to make each category its own web because I have too many (twenty or so), but I also don't want to lose the nice automagic functionality of automatically created topic/webindex lists (using the search variable feature). I want a category list to go in the left nav bar (created via page templates I think). I also want an automatically created topic list within each category.

If I understand all this correctly, I can create a TemplateCategory form on my CategoryCategory page (the parent of all categories) for adding new categories. I then create a RelatedTopics type of form within my basic topic creation template so that people can specify the category that the topic goes into. Then I use the the search variable to create an automatic topic/webindex type list within each ParentCategory page. Is this a correct understanding?

-- AmandaSmith - 13 Jan 2006

Ah hah! A very nice and helpful person pointed out the following Plugin: TopicClassificationAddOn which will do the trick quite nicely. I was trying to be a good newbie and looked around quite a bit before posting my question, but I guess I didn't look far enough. Thanks to all for their patience with me.

-- AmandaSmith - 13 Jan 2006