Re: num_entries should not apply to category views

On Wed, 2008-04-02 at 22:10 +0300, Jukka Ruohonen wrote:
> Although I agree with the original argument that it is somewhat absurd not to be
> able to read rest of the entries due to the num_entries, I find myself liking the
> current behavior. Thanks goes to two plugins and their authors: wbgpager-plugin 
> breaks num_entries nicely into pieces and readmore-plugin cuts longer entries. The 
> result is visually appealing and easy to navigate. (I abstain from saying anything 
> about what goes under the hood.)

I don't think wbgpager is a good way to navigate through a category. It
means you have to scroll past the body of every post to get to the one
you want, going through many pages, which is a lot of scrolling, and a
lot of distracting visual noise. So lets say you use a flavour for
category paths that shows only the title of each post so you can
navigate more quickly, now each post is just one line so you'll want to
increase the number of entries on each page by increasing num_entries,
but that will also apply to the front page where each post is shown in
full...

As a compromise I would suggest breaking num_entries into two
configuration variables: num_entries and num_entries_category.

> So a counterargument: if you have categories with huge number of entries in them, 
> and especially if you tend to write a little longer entries, the old problem (cf. 
> the change of num_entries from fifty to ten) appears; loading a page under these 
> settings is neither efficient nor ergonomic.

The way I would use it, I would set num_entries to a low number so not
too much data is loaded on the front page, and for category pages I
would use a flavour that displays the title only for each post, so again
not much data would be loaded (even though a lot of posts are
represented). 

Admittedly if you really had a lot of posts in a category it might still
be nice to have the category views split into pages, but again I think
you would want a smaller num_entries for the front page and a larger
num_entries for the category pages. So should we have num_entries and
num_entries_categories?



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