11 Aug
2010
11 Aug
'10
1:46 p.m.
Hi guys,
Short story:
1/ glorify macro categories and use them for more than presentational
purposes (e.g. using a category to differentiate "gadgets" macros from
other macros)
2/ allow a macro to be part of multiple categories at the same time
WDYT?
Long story:
I have read http://markmail.org/thread/wwv56pojo6rix5zv about the
current implementation for macro categories and I noticed that the
discussion / approach there focuses on the presentational use of
categories for macros, how to display them grouped to the user. I would
say there's an important additional usecase, the usage of categories as
macros metadata, describing their semantic, to allow some apps to
implement different behaviour for macros in a category or another. For
example, in the case of gadgets / dashboard, if a gadget would be
implemented as a macro, then we'd need some sort of method to
differentiate the macros that can be used as gadgets. The most
'semantic' way would be to use a gadgets category to mark the gadgets,
and the dashboard implementation will allow only macros from this
category to be added in the dashboard. However this approach would mean
that macro category gains importance, and we need to think if it's still
ok that an admin can change the category of a macro and the macro
category declared by the author can be completely overwritten.
WDYT about using the macro categories for much more than grouping for
presentation?
I'm +1, and I think that ftm there's no need to strategy change wrt to
who establishes the category of a macro.
Also, because of this, it's very possible that we might need a macro to
be part of more than one category, because, to continue the example, we
might want gadgets to also be grouped in several categories (of
gadgets), or a gadget to also be included in the, say, "presentation"
category of macros to be used in plain xwiki documents.
WDYT?
I am +1 for this as well, and ready to start building the patch (modulo
some macros API changes) as soon as we all agree.
Thanks,
Anca