Parent and grandparent page

Parent and grandparent page

wikinet 22 Dec 2009 01:15

Hi friends!

Here I am with another question!

As many of you already know I have an encyclopedia about villages in Portugal. I'm now introducing variables in my site just to automatize the process of displaying maps and photos inside an infobox in each page. In a page about a village, per example, I use %%parent_name%% in a _template to display the name of the municipality (parent page) where that village belongs. Also, with that variable, I can display the map and the coat of arms of that municipality. But imagine that I want to display automatically the name of the district (grandparent page) or the region (gran-grandparent page) of that village. Because I have all that pages nested in a hierarchical way, I can see that info in the breadcrumbs bellow the Page Title. However, is there any way to get those grandparent pages in a variable or in any other way?

Just an example:

Page 1 Torre de Dornes - That's a monument in a small village. Using %%parent_name%% the infobox (bellow the Google ad) display the Coat of Arms of the village where this monument is located.
Page 2 (parent) Dornes - That's the village. Using %%parent_name%% the infobox display the name and map of the municipality where the village is located.
Page 3 (grandparent) Ferreira do Zêzere - That's the municipality. Using %%parent_name%% the infobox display the sub-region where the municipality is located.

So, my question is… is there a way to display automatically the map in the page 1 using the name of page 3? Something like %%grandparent_name%%?

In fact, each page already display the grandparent and grand-grandparent (and so on) in the breadcrumbs. I just want a way to decide which of those pages I want to select… Maybe this is impossible, but we can dream, can't we?

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Carlos Pereira

Last edited on 22 Dec 2009 01:17 by wikinet + Show more

Re: Parent and grandparent page

scottplan 22 Dec 2009 01:54

Seems like a cool idea. Maybe there's a way to lift the breadcrumbs and apply them elsewhere on the page. I don't know it.

Following through your child-parent-grandparent chain, it looks like all your pages are in the main category. I dunno, but maybe you'd be better off grouping your pages into their respective categories: Região, Sub-região, municipality, village, location. That might help with future list sorting and grouping.

Re: Parent and grandparent page

wikinet 22 Dec 2009 15:12

Hi scottplan!

grouping your pages into their respective categories

I had that idea too when I initially planned the site. However, my site is an encyclopedia who depends in a great way of the visitors participation. Creating new articles in the main category is more simple to understand for everyone and do not require the article creator to insert category:article.

Another problem was the necessity to create a _template for so many categories. Remember that Portugal have 308 municipalities and more than 4.500 submunicipalities. However, that problem was partially solved when I discovered that I can make a _template and then include it, as explained here: http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-204035/same-live-template-for-different-categories With that solution I still need to create hundreds of _template pages but the changes could be done in a single general _template included in all the others.

However, I'm starting to question that decision I made, because nobody makes the page parenting. So, I'm forced to attend to each new article and select the parent page. That way, if I made the parenting I can also categorize that new articles. I need to think better in all of this…

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Carlos Pereira

Re: Parent and grandparent page

scottplan 23 Dec 2009 12:50

Simple front-end systems usually involve wonky (and eventually, tedious) back-end sorting duties for the admin — seems like you're realizing that already.

Maybe within each category _template, beneath %%content%%, you could set up a NewPage module that creates pages in an automatic child category, setting the existing page as the default parent page. You could prompt your users to start from the next-higher (and correctly located) node in order to post a new page.

You could also tag all new pages as _new, so you can easily sort them for review, to adjust their settings as needed. Once a new page has passed your review, you could delete the _new tag.

+++ Create a new page about a village in this %%category%%

[[module NewPage button="new village page" category="village" parent="%%fullname%%" tags="_new"]]

And all this wouldn't have to fully replace your current system. If it's too much hassle for any user to accurately position a page, they could resort to a generic NewPage module located in the sidebar, which would create an uncategorized, orphaned page (also tagged _new). Then it would be up to you to rename it and assign a parent — same as now.

(It sure is fun to propose stuff for other people's wikis — much simpler than making it happen in our own!)