Re: num_entries should not apply to category views

One thing I did realise after posting is that num_entries does not apply
to the tag views provided by the tags plugin. So I could use tags
instead of categories, and have a simple script that converts all my
categories to tags, and then I would also have the advantage of being
able to give more than one tag to each post.

However, I do think the simple change to the pyblosxom code would be an
improvement.

The only use-case I can think of that the change would break is when
people subscribe to the RSS feed of a particular category. The feed will
contain all entries, instead of just the first few like the main feed
does, and like I think feeds are generally expected to. But I think
being able to subscribe to per-category RSS feeds is much more of a
bonus feature (that would be appropriately implemented by a plugin) than
being able to navigate the blog well (which is a basic feature).

On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 11:35 -0400, will wrote:
> I think it's a one-liner to implement because we already do this for 
> date-based archives.  It also cleans up some issues with the "default 
> install" in an amicable way.
> 
> Anyone else have any thoughts or use-cases where changing this behavior 
> is a bad idea?
> 
> /will
> 
> 
> chombee wrote:
> > I'd like to propose that the num_entries config variable should only
> > apply to the front page of a blog, i.e. /pyblosxom.cgi and not also to
> > category paths like pyblosxom.cgi/computers/operating_systems/ as it
> > currently does. I just don't see the usefulness of being able to read
> > the first num_entries posts of a given category but not the rest, and I
> > think viewers will naturally take the posts shown to be the full content
> > of the category. I think that blogs would be much quicker and easier to
> > navigate if category paths showed all entries of the specified category,
> > just like time-based paths show all entries matching the specified time,
> > and this behaviour also seems to fit better with the blosxom philosophy
> > (of behaving like the file system).
> > 
> > This way, you could create an 'archive' flavour that renders only the
> > title of each post and not the content, and apply that flavour to all
> > the year and category paths. Then with the pyarchives and pycategories
> > plugins in your sidebar, users would be able to quickly browse the
> > archives of your blog by category or by time. This is the approach used
> > by nanoblogger, for example, and a quick browse of the nanoblogger site
> > shows how pleasant it is to be able to quickly see what is there and
> > navigate to it, without needing to scroll through the full content of
> > all the posts.
> > 
> > I notice that blosxom follows this behaviour
> > <http://www.blosxom.com/documentation/users/view.html> and I think that
> > pyblosxom also used to do so. Why was it changed?
> > 
> > It seems to me that the wbgpager and wbgarchives plugins are effectively
> > workarounds for this num_entries issue, to allow the user to browse to
> > all entries without having to hack the URL. But it would work better and
> > be more elegant if num_entries simply did not apply to category paths,
> > and these plugins were not needed.
> > 
> > If a num_entries behaviour was really wanted for category views, though
> > I don't understand why, perhaps an additional variable
> > num_entries_categories could be used instead?
> 
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