Hi Team (and all others), I'm working on updating my blog to using
Roller 5.1 on OpenShift: http://web-gmazza.rhcloud.com/blog/. One
problem that's popped up is that there seems to be no defined ordering
of blog categories. I would like to have "Web Services" --> "Java" -->
"Tech" --> "Misc" displayed in that order but the ordering appears to be
completely random. If I try to rename categories to get them in the
desired ordering, or if I delete categories and add them in again in the
hopes they will be placed in the desired location (or at least at the
top or the bottom of the list), they still get inserted in the category
list at random locations.
This problem has existed for some time
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ROL-1166), but may be getting
worse due to the result of the switch from OpenJPA (which may have
internally assured that new items would always be kept at the end) to
EclipseLink. However, the underlying weblogcategory table has no
ordering column so there seems to be nothing that we can formally rely
on to ensure proper ordering. Anybody know otherwise? If not, I'd like
to make the following changes in Roller 5.1:
1.) Add a new "ordering" column to the weblogcategory table. Similar to
priority in the bookmark table, it would be a numeric indicator of the
relative ordering of the category with respect to the others. Until the
user interface is updated to allow for moving categories up and down,
new categories will always be placed at the bottom of the list, allowing
a user to get his desired category ordering by the way he enters in new
categories.
As part of migration from earlier Roller versions, the "ordering" could
be null (so, random as before) until a category change is made, and then
numbers assigned based on location in the category list.
2.) As part of #1, I'd like to eliminate sub-categories from the
weblogcategory table. They're seldom used (I don't know of any blog,
Roller or otherwise, that has them today), unsupported by most if not
all Roller themes, don't work the way people would like[1], and their
use case is usually met today by using blog entry tags, multiple blogs
or a Wiki instead. The idea of subcategories is that I can have
"Finance", "Sports", and "Travel" as main categories, "Asian Markets",
"European Markets", "USA Market", "NHL", "NBA", "NFL", etc., as
subcategories, but anybody blogging so extensively to need subcategories
is probably going to have create separate and specialized Finance,
Sports, and Travel blogs anyway.
As part of migration from earlier Roller versions, either the parentID
column from weblogcategory table will be removed/ignored, making all
blog categories top-level, or similarly the parentID column for each
category will be set to the "root" category and just the UI changed to
no longer support subcategories.
WDYT?
Regards,
Glen
[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ROL-1593,
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ROL-1252
- Add category ordering, remove sub-categories in Roller 5.1? Glen Mazza
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