Classifying recipes

That's good news about Matthias' response (not that I expected anything
different!)

As part of the ongoing work on TOC-related issues, I'm going to try
something which I think will work very well.  I'll describe it briefly here
and actually try it on the site later today.  This is experimental, if we
don't like it I'll undo it or change it.

TWiki has the ability to associate an HTML form with a topic, and its
searching features allow it to query values on those forms.  I think we can
use this to make organization of the cookbook much more automatic.

What I'm planning to do initially is have a small form associated with each
topic that's intended to be part of the cookbook.  It will have two or three
fields: at least, TopicType and ParentTopic, and possible also OtherParents.

TopicType will classify the topic as one of e.g. Recipe, Section, Chapter,
Glossary, Other.  Types can be added to this list, which will appear on a
topic called TopicType.

ParentTopic will provide a more conveniently accessible way of accessing and
changing the page's parent.  The list of possible parent topics will be
limited to pages classified as e.g. Sections or Chapters.  This field will
specifically be for situations in which the parent either includes the
topic's contents, or has a TOC reference to it, so it's a bit more specific
that TWiki's existing notion of parent.  (I may end up calling it something
different to reflect that.)

OtherParents will support the ability to have a topic referenced from more
than one place.  On the wiki site, this would typically simply involve a
link.  For a printed cookbook, it will be possible to have the actual topic
contents appear only in one place (the primary parent), with the
OtherParents simply including a chapter or page number reference.

If every topic is classified this way, then it will become possible to
automatically generate e.g. lists of recipes for index pages, and lists of
chapters, and in general will allow us to better manage the ever-growing
collection of topics.

Another field I'm thinking about is NextTopic, which will allow sibling
topics to control how they're ordered.  However, this only works for a
single ordering, which won't handle the multiple parent case, so it probably
needs to be integrated with the "TOC language" described in
AdminCookbookViews.

Anton



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