[xwiki-devs] [DISCUSSION] Macro categories

Hi all, This is about implementing back-end support for macro categories. My understanding of macro categories and it's implementation is bit vague at this point, hopefully this email will set things straight. To understand the usefulness of macro categories, have a look at confluence macro browser: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Working+with+the+Macro+Browser We can identify several categories by looking at confluence but XWiki will need several other categories as well. I can think of few XWiki macro categories: * Presentation - Macros that allow presenting document content with various styles. Like box & code macros * Document content - Macros that add stuff into a wiki page, like image, video & office macros. * Scripting - HTML, Velocity, Groovy, Ruby etc. * Visualization / Reporting - Chart macro and the like. * External content - Macros that fetch content from external sources. Like Rss macro. * Development - Macros in development / introductory stage. I'm pretty sure there are more categories to consider (please list them). Now for the real questions that are troubling me: * Should these categories be statically defined inside the rendering module? This would mean that the macro author gets to select which category his macro belogs to, which in turn means we should have a method like: MacroCategory getCategory() inside the Macro interface. Using this information MacroManager will present different macro categories to the outside world. * The other approach is to keep this categorization inside some wiki pages and allow administrators to manipulate it: Create / Edit categories, assign macros to categories etc. I'm not sure what problems this would create when implementing macro browser though. * Another (very hackish) approach would be to use the component role hint in the same fashion it is used to specify macros for different syntaxes. I think this is enough to get the discussion started. Thank you very much for your input. - Asiri