Sub-categories - a must

[spinfx]

Hi Team

First of all, Congrats on the win in the UK awards. 

Our site is very big and has many separate sections that each deal with different aspects of our Department. Beneath each section are the categories (of course), but each of these has a host of pages  and if we look at each national park (of which we have over 70), there are suites of pages dealing with various aspects of the parks.

Ideally, we need the ability to have at least 3-4 more levels of sub-categories (unlimited nested categories would be great, but I suspect would become too unwieldy) or sub-sections and subcategories.

I appreciate the discipline of creating a site with no more than three levels, but sites such as ours are just so big that what we have in effect is a collection of sites for each aspect of our business. That being the case, three levels just doesn't work for us and we're having great difficulties keeping everything within the section/category/content model.

So please, please, please - let's have subcategories too - and the sooner the better. 

Cheers and keep up the good work

David

[vavroom]

Yes, it's on the way. 

[bostanio]

Nic,

Any clues as to when subcategories will be available? 1.0.x? 1.1? 2.0?

I'm developing a component and a change to allow subcategories will mean adapting my code.

Also will it be possible to have content and subcategories in a category or will content only be allowed at the bottom level of subcategorization?

[vavroom]

I'm sorry Jon, I don't know exactly when this is going to be happening, but it involves some serious re-writing of DB schema, so it's not just around the corner.  And I believe (though I'm not doing that work) that the content item will be able to be placed at any level of the hierarchy (as well as being associated to several categories)

[eyezberg]

For big sites, there is always the possibility to organize your content differently, by thinking differently (not starting from the technical Joomla limitations/setup, but from your content..).
Define which content groups you need (items 1,2,3,.. in each of site a,b,c,..., all in national park x, which is in national parks east (others being for ex. west, south, norht, center.. etc etc).
Then, start setting up your sections/categories on an as-low-as-needed sublevel, for ex. section = national park x, categoeries = site a, b, c, .. and the individual items.
Now, you'll see you're missing the super-levels of national parks east, and if requiered, national parks (2 more levels). These you can fake by creating the corresponding section and category, with a description for each, and you will set up the hierarchy you want (to show to the user) by selecting the requiered "parent" when you make the menus.
Ex: menu link 1 = parent of all other: National Parks (section with one cat').
This will be parent of the National Parks East (cat' in previous, empty)
This in turn will be parent of (this is where your real content starts!) National Park x (section)
Which is parent of Site A (category)
which finaaly holds your content items..

hope this makes sense

[vavroom]

Thanks Joe, it makes sense (to me anyway) and I had never thought about this...  But it just might work!

It does have limitation in what you can display when clicking on those menu items, but it shoudl work nicely nonetheless

Cheers

[brudinie]

I agree that this is an important feature.

Sub categories will also be really useful for menu systems.

There is already one tree menu module that displays documents by section category but without sub cats it restricts you to two levels.

[sailforfun15]

The problem that I see with this approach is that the pages for the upper level menu items will not automatically contain links to their submenu items. The user must realize that the submenu items are displayed in nav menu and click there. This works for some sites, but not for others. I'd like both: submenu items and the page for their parent to include an overview of each menu item. I am thinking that the only way to do this in Joomla is by creating static pages for the upper menu item that a title and overview for each of the submenu items and links to the same page as the submenu items. This is not ideal (the page should be dynamic), but I've not found a better way to do it yet.

Infinite subcategories are definitely needed, but we also need the ability to tag content items with multiple categories and to have categories with multiple parents (a polyhierarchy). Drupal supports both of these approaches.

Todd

[spinfx]

Good news vavoom - the sooner the better would make our job much easier.

For big sites, there is always the possibility to organize your content differently, by thinking differently (not starting from the technical Joomla limitations/setup, but from your content..).

OK eyezberg - I undertstand what you're saying and we've looked at all sorts of ways of overcoming this limitation, but we have SO much content that it's just not practical to split up the categories any further.

Our Sections are: About Us; Nature & Biodiversity; Parks & Recreation; Community; News; Shop

Within each of those sections are the categories: About Us (12); Nature & Biodeiversity (_8); Parks & Recreation (13); Community (12); News (10); Shop (3)

And within the categories there are several suites of pages on various subjects that sit under the broad categories. If we were able to group those suites of pages in sub-categories, that would solve our need and make the navigation so much simpler.

So we'll wait here with baited breath.

Cheers, David 

[miau]

Infinite subcategories are definitely needed, but we also need the ability to tag content items with multiple categories and to have categories with multiple parents (a polyhierarchy). Drupal supports both of these approaches.

I would badly need this Features too, especialy the second one.
There are some workarounds as mentioned above, but they make working less intuitive and efficient. I am glad to hear that the Multi levels are planned! But what about the "tag content items with multiple categories"? Here the only workaround (duplicating item and mantaining 2 copies ).

Michael

[TarantinoArchives]

why not go away from the section/category system and just do 'folders', you can stack indefinitely, just like in a folder structue in windows explorer. you might put a limit there of 4 or something. i think that would be fine.

a feature i am VERY much looking forward to

[brudinie]

TarantinoArchives, good idea.
However, people want the ability to asign multiple categories to content items.

Therefore, I suggest that the dev team get rid of sections and introduce the ability to nest categories. Its the same idea as folders but the terminology is more suited.

You could asign a content item to multiple categories at any level.

Cheers

Guy

[miau]

To explain better why adding content items to more categories would be useful:

• Categroization by Topic
• Categroization by Regions the contents are related to
• Categroization by Target Groups

The Content management System would become a database of its contents. The user can decide wether to search the Contents by topic or by region. Does not have to guess wether the content is stored here or there.

Michael

[TarantinoArchives]

for example i use joomla for a director's homepage. i dont just want every film (= category) in a filmography (=section), i also want to have sub categories where i can have things sorted by directing, screenwriting, year, etc...

[sailforfun15]

I think the ultimate solution here is to recognize that content types are complex objects that need to be defined based on one or more ontologies. Joomla's sections and categories, Plone's folders and keywords, and Drupal's multiple controlled vocabularies, are all increasingly more capable means of capturing content type atttributes and metadata, but all of them are far less flexible (and ultimately less usaeful) than the approaches being used for the semantic web and modern controlled medical vocabularies. In some of the examples above, posters have indicated a need to display and sort content based on both attributes as well as categories. If we used the Web Ontology Language to define our content types, and then based the CMS on this, we could easily achieve this flexibility. For example, I would like my university (where I am Chair of the committee that oversees the entire web site) to have a university wide, academic publication list that each faculty member and student could contribute to and generate web listings. For instance, all of my publications would appear on my home page and could be edited, searched, sorted in various ways, and so on. I might want publications by year, by type (journal, conference, book chapter), by first author, by status (in press, submitted, unpublished, published), or by review status (peer reviewed, non-peer reviewed, invited), and so on. I also want related publications to show up on my research project pages, so I'll need to include metadata about which project(s) each publications is associated with. My school will want a listing of all publications from all of its faculty and students, so now we need to get a listing of publications based on affiliations of the authors of those publications. Thus, author is another content type with its own attributes whose values come from controlled vocabularies. Note that it isn't good enough to restrict the publication list based on author name, such as "Johnson, T." because at a large site there may be many "Johnson, T.s" Content objects need attribute values that are themselves other content objects. In this way, even if there were 5 Johnson, T.s the system would know which publications were written by each of them.

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) gives us all of this flexibility. The difficulty for CMS developers is to figure out how to harness the power of OWL in a way that is user friendly for developers and end users.

Todd

[TarantinoArchives]

yeah, and not to make it too complicated. the entire thing should be scalable. for normal use just a basic system (sections/categories) like, for advanced systems something like you just mentioned, and for professionals, a totally customizeable system.
I think Content Management not only means to be able to simply publish articles on a website, it also means, foremost, managing content. And Content Management is not something you need for 20 to 50 pages, it's usually needed technical aid if you have to manage hundreds, if not thousands of documents. A clear, logic, structured and customizeable system is essential, in my opinion.
I love Joomla already, coming from Mambo, but I think a quick adaptation of new methods in terms of content management and arrangement should be a very high priority maybe already for 1.1

[Hackwar]

Joomla 1.1 will be coming soon with translated backend, heavy usage of the patTemplate-engine and probably ACL-support. Heavy changes in the structure of how content will be organized will not be involved in 1.1.

[ssuess]

This is an EXTREMELY important feature for us as well. Is there any third party project out there that addreses this currently? Is there any word on what version of Joomla this will make it into? Thanks!

[lopes_andre]

Hi,

I have joomla 1.0, and I need the feature "sub-categories". How can I solve this problem for now with joomla 1.0?


Sorry my english.

Best Regards, André.

[Hackwar]

@ssuess and lopes_andres
At the moment there is no way around the restrictions to the section/categorie system. In contrast to the posting of jaclplus in another thread I don't think this is so easy, either. The devs are thinking about a node based (=unlimited depth of categories) structure, but there is nothing definitiv at the moment.

Hackwar

[Tonie]

A rebuild of limitless depth for content, requires a total rewrite of the content part in Joomla. This requires a lot of work, so it was decided to add other features to the Joomla core first.

[pollen8]

hmm correct me if I'm wrong but wasnt a node based system implented in the *ambo cvs before Joomla forked??

[TarantinoArchives]

haven't read anything on that in the Mambo 4.5.3 Press-Release from last week actually so I think not.

[pollen8]

I guess the new road map (from the new mambo team) has changed. - I found a thread on the other forum mentioning about tree view for content -
http://forum.mamboserver.com/showthread ... ontent+cvs

I've trashed my old 4.5.3 cvs test install, so can't confirm it, but I definately remember seeing it 

[Hackwar]

hmm correct me if I'm wrong but wasnt a node based system implented in the *ambo cvs before Joomla forked??

I'm very sure that there was nothing in this direction in 453

[pollen8]

ah my bad, reinstalled the old cvs version i had i realised that there was no node based stuff, but a tree view of the category/section structure currently used

[toologic]

A rebuild of limitless depth for content, requires a total rewrite of the content part in Joomla. This requires a lot of work, so it was decided to add other features to the Joomla core first.

I think not need total rewriting content module. Just, on first stage, will be enougth go away from linking one-to-one (content unit and section\category). Lets make additional sql table, where linked contentid, sectionid, catid. And we will have relations many-to-many.

Plus, rewrite a few sql "select.." and Ok. Add to content edit-form second category and it will be work exellence.

I work on huge travel portal, where ALL content have a two (as minimum) degree of categorization: thematic of content(one or few) and related (materic, country(one or few), travel zone).

[louis.landry]

Unfortunately it isn't quite that simple.... It isn't that the implementation is INCREDIBLY hard to do, it is that it would break a large amount of backward compatibility.  Not to mention how closely coupled things like the menu are to the section -> category -> content structure....

Louis

[ccondrup]

webImagery: If a new version is released with these wanted features, I think people will redesign their sites' categorization and menus anyway, so that's not a valid reason to postpone it. So you might wonder when would be a good time to require people to do this? I say A.S.A.P! The more time and widespread the cms gets, the more people it affects - not good.

Devs have stated they do not officially support forums and such because they want to focus on the core CMS functionality - and when we reply with whats the most important core functionality thats lacking, we get "oh no, that requires a major change in core, yikes".... uhm, what?

Content categorization is core cms functionality!

I believe every other type of site than personal/blog will need more than 2 levels for content categorization, and many will want to categorize the same content under several different terms. I understand this might be hard, but I cannot see why we cannot have either: 1. Section > Category > Subcategory, or 2. Get rid of Section, and just use Categories. As many as you'd like.

[louis.landry]

You are preaching to the choir.  I've been wanting a node based system for a long time.  The fact is, that it is not going to be in the 1.1 release.  There has been significant work to 1.1, most of the work has gone into into reworking the entire architecture of Joomla.

Louis