Categories can be used to organize the pages of your wiki in several ways. It is possible to assign another lay-out, other user's rights, and improved navigation to parts of your wiki. Typically, assigning and changing categories is something for site administrators, and not to be left to the users of your site.
In this respect, categories are like MediaWiki namespaces, but better and more useful. Unfortunately, they are not much like traditional categories. Your best option for categories at the present time is to use tags instead.
Wikidot combines namespaces and categories in an unusual but useful way. As with namespaces, the category is part of the url. For example :
[[[category:page]]]
Listing Pages by Category
Several modules have "category" as a criteria for selecting pages to list:
- PageCalendar — lists number of new pages per year/month of the specified category ->PageCalendar Example
- ListPages — universal module for selecting, processing and listing pages -> ListPages Example
- Pages — module for listing pages -> Pages Example
- PagesByTag — lists all pages, that are tagged with a specific tag -> PagesByTag Example
- TagCloud — creates a customizable tag cloud for tagged pages (of the specified category) ->TagCloud Example
Pages can be listed by category using the Pages module.
Built-in Categories
Default
Default is the base "category". It requires no stub. This page's url is en:categories, so it's in the "en" and not in the default category.
Nav (Navigation)
The nav category is used for the side (nav:side) and top (nav:top) menu pages: Menu
System
The system category is used for general wiki use, such as listing all pages system:list-all-pages.
- There are other pages in the system category, please list them.
Forum
The forum category is used for… you guessed it… the built in wiki forum.
- forum:start is the forum index.
- forum:recent-posts lists the recent posts of your forum. It uses a module to do this.
- there are probably others
Admin
The admin category is used for admin pages, of which there is only one :
- admin:manage, the site manager
Access rights per Category
Default access rights are defined by the wiki administrator.
New categories inherit from default access rights.
Specific access rights might be defined by category.
Examples:
- admin: restricted acces rights to admins ans moderators
- user: one might imagine that only the creator of a page falling in this category could modify his/her page (admins keep all access rights)
Themes by Category
The wiki administrator may apply different themes to different categories. Example: one could create color variations of a base theme, i.e. a pink theme for category girls:, blue theme for category boys:
Known Problems
One Category Only
Because the category is really a namespace, it limits your page to only one category. As a workaround, you can use tags.
Categories Cannot Be Nested
Because there is no category page to edit, categories cannot be nested. Instead, the pages in a category can only be listed in one big list.
Categories are Automatically Created
Whenever a url contains a namespace format with a colon, the category is automatically created. Unfortunately, while this does save time, it causes you to have to pipe link pages with a colon.
Related Pages
Backlinks
These pages link back to this one. You may find them helpful.
