I decided to use the normal category markup to include a category link on a blog page. This way the blog pages are included (linked to) in the general category? pages. But I wanted specific blog categories to show the blog entries with that category. The answer was to use a page for each blog category with a pagelist markup to search for the category word in the blog pages. So the blog categories are a sort of subset of all categories, displaying only blog pages. And the blog BlogCategories page is hand-crafted to include only specific blog categories, not the whole lot used on the wiki. Well this works, but a better way would be to have an actual trail page containing a list of links to the pages, and have each new blog page adding to the relevant list. This is not possible yet but may be soon.
What we need is a general method to allow a page to add itself as a link in a specified format to a number of trail pages. It should not be limited to one blogtrail page. For instance in this blog setup each blog page is listed on
- Recent Posts
- Categories, i.e a blog category page, if the blog page carries one (or more)
- Archive of the month (or some other time-interval specific page)
I used pagelist markup for each of these, but it would be much better if each list is populated over time when new pages are created, to serve as wiki trail pages. Then blog pages can carry trail markup to link from one to the next. so we can have a trail wandering through recent posts, a trail through a past month (archive), a trail through a blog category. The only existing mechanism to do something similar is used for RecentChanges pages. RecentChanges is populated over time with every page change. $RecentChangesFmt allows to output each page addition in a certain format.
It would be nifty if the method used for creating RecentChanges pages would become a specific case in a more general method of automatic addition to certain trail pages on demand. I will call these auto-trail pages. -- Questions arising:
- How would it be determined to what auto-trail page a page-link gets added?
- Can a page-link be added to a specific location on the trail page, at a specific marker?
- Can the trail page determine the format of each page-link addition to its growing list?
My comments to these:
- An array for auto-populating trail pages and their rule-to-add attributes would be nice. A page-link will be added according to
- a general rule to add it (like RecentChanges for all pages)
- a specific rule to add it if it matches a pattern (is part of a group, for instance)
- a specific markup in the page to instruct addition to a specific auto-trail page (like Pm' suggestion to use a
(:blog:)markup to add the page to a blog trail) - An attribute to add it according to time: at creation time or when the page gets modified.
- the auto-trail page can carry a markup which specifies the position of page additions, i.e. the top of the list it creates
- This markup can include any formatting instructions, ideally somehow similar to pagelist using templates for formatting.
Any comments?
Comments:
Back to Blog Categories -- Blog Home Page