RE: Going live

I've started a page called RecentSiteChanges to help track changes to the
site structure.  The site should soon stabilize, but in the meantime, the
page should provide an overview of what's been going on.  The page lists the
three major changes I've done this weekend, along with some comments about
how it affects adding or editing of recipes (not much as yet).

Also, you can now reach the site via schemewiki.org or schemecookbook.org
(the latter may redirect you to the former; that's a temporary setup).

Following on from the discussion about ordering of topics, I have another
change to the cookbook structure that I'd like to make.  I've described this
in CookbookStructure.

This change will address the point which I mentioned in the first "Going
live" message:

>   * Two-level limit.  The search query used by RecipeIndex is limited
> to two levels: chapters, and their direct children (sections, recipes
> etc.)  This isn't a particularly serious limitation given the current
> cookbook content, though.

Noel's response pointed out an area in which this limitation actually was
serious: "Having to supply a total ordering on recipes is a bit of a pain".

With the two-level approach I was proposing, as seen in RecipeIndex,
sections couldn't be interleaved with recipes, without requiring a total
ordering on all sections and recipes in a chapter.  This would be a problem
in cases like the StringRecipes chapter, which has an "Other Recipes of
interest" and a "References" section, after the main recipes section.  Pain
would be an understatement here, if all recipes as well as sections had to
be ordered as siblings, just to support having some sections appear after
the recipes.

This led me to a slightly more ambitious solution, which works out much more
nicely anyway, and solves the major outstanding issues of cookbook
structure, making things more automatic.  That's what's described in the
CookbookStructure topic.

A brief summary: chapters will become auto-generated topics which simply
consist of section topics, appended together by a search query.  A typical
chapter will consist of at least two topics: an introduction section and a
recipes section.  Other sections are optional.  The recipe section will also
be generated by a search query.  An example of this approach can be seen in
NumberRecipes and and StringRecipes, which have been converted to the new
design.  The consequences of this can be seen in the new SectionIndex.  Try
clicking on the "alternate view" link on that page, to see how individual
recipes are integrated into the contents, for the Numbers and Strings
chapters.  Something similar now happens on the new TOC page.

All this means that contributors will no longer have to worry about adding
their recipes anywhere - no editing of chapters or TOCs will be required, as
long as they classify their recipe properly.  All the structural stuff will
be generated.  A fully hierarchical structure can be supported - probably
including e.g. "Parts" to the book, if we want to group chapters into larger
units (looking at the current set of chapters, we might want to do that).
For more detail about all of this, see CookbookStructure.

If anyone sees any problems with this approach, please let me know.
Otherwise, I'll go ahead and convert the existing chapters into collections
of sections over the coming week.

Anton



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