[TYPO3-ect] Concept of global categories

[Ernesto Baschny [cron IT]]

Elmar Hinz schrieb am 10.01.2006 09:02:

> some of you seemed to be interested to establish a system of global categories.
> I will work this week on an article about the scopes of ECT and would like to
> mention the idea of global categories. Could you please point out your ideas about?
> 
> What is missing in the current system?
> Why is wrong with the concept of a global storage page?
> How should the media categories of DAM be related to it?
> How should internationalization be handled?
> How to use different global systems for different sites in the same database?

It would be interesting to know how categories are being used currently
by extentions. As far as I see, most of the categories offer:

- Name/Title
- Image
- Description
- Parent Category - for hierarchies of categories

This could be what a generic "TYPO3-Category" offers (maybe the one or
another field). If an extention needs more, it has to extend the
category-table accordingly (as we already do for tt_content etc).

Another feature I would like is to be able to see the category-tree
right away in the TYPO3 page tree, instead of a "flat list" of data records.

So maybe the idea would be simply to use the "pages" table for that. We
define a new doktype "category": So now most of the
TYPO3-hierarchy-functions already apply: generating trees, having
categories displayed in the page-tree, etc. And the fields that we need
are already there in the pages table: the name ("title"), image
("media"), description and some others (keywords, shortcut). We even
already have a working internationalization. And, generating a HMENU of
a category-tree? Nothing easier than that in this approach, we do that
on a daily basis!

Currently each extention that needs select-boxes in a TCEform with a
treeview of categories needs to write its own userFunc for that purpose.
I would like TYPO3 to provide such functionality by default. Or, if we
are using pages, we could just use the page-browser to add categories to
an item.

For each plugin you should be able to point it to a specific PageID
where the "category-tree" starts.

There are probably some more things to think of, if we choose this
approach (for TYPO3 4.5?):

- the "categories tree" should be handled differently than normal page
trees, especially for selecting categories. We want an user to select
categories from the tree but not be able to change them (or maybe even
see tham in the page-tree). So this tree should not be amongst his
mount-points, but he should be able to select them through the
page-browser. This is similar to what already have been requested (to
link to pages outside the mount-point-tree, see
http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=1618).

- it should be possible to disallow creating any data-records inside
this specific page-tree. I have already suggested a similar more generic
wish: To be able to set in PageTS which record-types a user is allowed
to create inside a page (and its child pages). We could restrict to
"tt_news" records on News-SysFolders and to "NONE" on category-Folders.

- probably others..

Cheers,
Ernesto