VbzCart wikified topics

Notes

Some preliminary design notes on using MediaWiki Categories to manage the store topic links.

The basic idea is that we would designate a set of Categories for use in the store "topics" pages. The categories to be used would probably be designated by some sort of prefix on the category name, like 'vtopic'... so a topic which would be displayed as "Stuff and Things" would have the page name "Category:vtopic:Stuff and Things".

Probably going to abandon the numeric topics, and have aliases. Old-style number-topics will be redirected to new-style names. Aliases and alternate spellings will be redirected the same way.

So, for example: topics/1367/ (subject -> dates):

• looks up a page called Category:vtopic:1367
• that page contains "#redirect [[Category:vtopic:dates]]"
• Category:vtopic:dates contains:
  • Category:vtopics (for ease of maintenance, and perhaps for generating master index)
  • Delimiter to indicate beginning of vbzcart data
  • List of catalog numbers
  • Long-version title ("items with a date")
  • For utility topics:
    • Descriptive text for web page
  • For folder topics:
    • optional flag: display thumbnails of other items in topic
    • optional flag: display subtopic items within this topic (recurse only as long as this flag is set in subtopics)

Tables

Process: find title in page.page_title, get page.page_latest. Look that up in revision.rev_id, get revision.rev_text_id. Look that up in text.old_id, and get text.old_text, which is the raw (unparsed) contents of the page.

Relevant bits of existing MediaWiki tables:

page

page_id	Autonumber
page_namespace	int	14 = categories
page_title	str	name of page, not including namespace prefix
page_restrictions	flags
page_counter	int	possibly number of edits?
page_is_redirect	flag	includes #redirect
page_is_new	flag
page_random	float	used for "Random page"
page_touched	date/time	when page last saved?
page_latest
page_len

pagelinks

pl_from	int
pl_namespace	int	index to hard-coded namespaces array
pl_title	string	name of target page?

revision

rev_id	int	local key
rev_page	int	foreign key from [page]
rev_text_id	int	foreign key to [text]

text

Contains the (unparsed) page contents for all revisions

old_id

int

local key