My apologies in advance because I have not had a chance to read this
complete thread, I may be responding to a perceived issue while missing
particular inputs by Ed. board members.
I like wikis.
I have used them since the dawn of wiki.
Wikis are good, and I would say that Drupal is a (wiki-like)
collaborative authoring environment out of the box without any added
wiki modules. We can and will be adding wiki modules to the
DITA.xml.org site. I have already started implementing the FreeLinking
module that lets you add CamelCase links in your content. At the same
time, I think we may be missing the wiki-ness of Drupal regardless of
whether we implement more wiki-related feature modules like
FreeLinking.
I just want to point out that a major feature of Drupal is it's
capability to organize content around categories (called
taxonomies[1][2]) and offers easy ways of navigating those categories
including the individual terms, aggregation of terms and subsets of
terms within the vocabularies.
So, lets say for argument there is a vocabulary around 'conformance'
with terms like 'tool', 'testing', 'validation', 'level'. Then members
create 20 pages of content about conformance. They (or an editor) can
tag each page with the appropriate terms. The site can offer a
'conformance' page that lists automatically the most recent pages on
the topic, with links to sub-topics etc. This way the site is both
wiki-like in that it is easy to create content; and it is UN-wiki-like
in that it is easy to navigate content automatically in ways that
weren't even envisioned at the time an article is written.
[1] Taxonomy module (Drupal core)
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/taxonomy
[2] Taxonomy admin guide from site /admin/help/taxonomy
taxonomy
Background
Taxonomy is
the study of classification. Drupal's taxonomy module allows you to
define vocabularies which are used to classify content. The module
supports hierarchical classification and association between terms,
allowing for truly flexible information retrieval and classification.
For more details about classification
types and insight into the development of the taxonomy module, see
this drupal.org discussion.
An example taxonomy: food
Notes
- The term Milk appears within both Dairy and Drink.
This is an example of multiple parents for a term.
- In Drupal the order of siblings (e.g. Beef, Chicken,
Lamb) in a vocabulary may be controlled with the weight
parameter.
Vocabularies
When
you create a controlled vocabulary you are creating a set of terms to
use for describing content (known as descriptors in indexing lingo).
Drupal allows you to describe each piece of content (blog, story, etc.)
using one or many of these terms. For simple implementations, you might
create a set of categories without subcategories, similar to Slashdot's sections. For more complex
implementations, you might create a hierarchical list of categories
such as Food taxonomy shown above.
Setting up a vocabulary
When setting up a controlled vocabulary, if you select the hierarchy
option, you will be defining a tree structure of terms, as in a
thesaurus. If you select the related terms option, you are
allowing the definition of related terms (think see also), as
in a thesaurus. Selecting multiple select
will allow you to describe a piece of content using more than one term.
That content will then appear on each term's page, increasing the
chance that a user will find it.
When setting up a controlled vocabulary you are asked for:
- Vocabulary name: The name for this vocabulary.
Example: Dairy.
- Description: Description of the vocabulary. This
can be used by modules and feeds.
- Types:
The list of content types you want to associate this vocabulary with.
Some available types are blog, book, forum, page, and story.
- Related terms: Allows relationships between
terms within this vocabulary. Think of these as see also
references.
- Hierarchy: Allows a tree-like vocabulary, as in
our Foods example above.
- Multiple select: Allows pieces of content to be
described using more than one term. Content may then appear on multiple
taxonomy pages.
- Required: If selected, each piece of content
must have a term in this vocabulary associated with it.
- Weight: The overall weight for this vocabulary
in listings with multiple vocabularies.
Adding terms to a vocabulary
Once
done defining the vocabulary, you have to add terms to it to make it
useful. The options you see when adding a term to a vocabulary will
depend on what you selected for related terms, hierarchy
and multiple select. These options are:
- Term name: The name for this term. Example: Milk.
- Description: Description of the term that may be
used by modules and feeds. This is synonymous with a "scope note".
- Parent:
Select the term under which this term is a subset -- the branch of the
hierarchy that this term belongs under. This is also known as the
"Broader term" indicator used in thesauri.
- Synonyms:
Enter synonyms for this term, one synonym per line. Synonyms can be
used for variant spellings, acronyms, and other terms that have the
same meaning as the added term, but which are not explicitly listed in
this vocabulary (i.e. unauthorized terms).
- Weight: The weight is used to sort the terms of
this vocabulary.
Displaying content organized by terms
In
order to view the content associated with a term or a collection of
terms, you should browse to a properly formed Taxonomy URL. For
example, taxonomy/term/1+2.
Taxonomy URLs always contain one or more term IDs at the end of the
URL. You may learn the term ID for a given term by hovering over that
term in the taxonomy
overview
page and noting the number at the end or the URL. To build a Taxonomy
URL start with "taxonomy/term/". Then list the term IDs, separated by
"+" to choose content tagged with any of the given
term IDs, or separated by "," to choose content tagged with all
of the given term IDs. In other words, "+" is less specific than ",".
Finally, you may optionally specify a "depth" in the vocabulary
hierarchy. This defaults to "0", which means only the explicitly listed
terms are searched. A positive number indicates the number of
additional levels of the tree to search. You may also use the value
"all", which means that all descendant terms are searched.
RSS feeds
Every term, or collection of terms, provides an RSS feed to which
interested users may subscribe. The URL format for a sample RSS feed is
taxonomy/term/1+2/0/feed.
These are built just like Taxonomy
URLs, but are followed by the word "feed".
--
Gregory S. Rundlett
Manager
Technology Services
OASIS
"Advancing E-Business Standards Since 1993"
http://www.oasis-open.org
(978) 667-5115 x 205
