This original posting will be rewritten some posts below since there was some basic missunderstanding of concepts included.


[size=x-small]Purpose of this thread:

Discussion of enhancing the current pagenavigation (prefered) or creating an additional one. Once the discussion here has been resolved either we found someone who is willing to do this along the way *hint hint* or we put the final draft on the feature request tracker and hope for the best.


Whats this about?

I believe we really lack in the area of pagenavigation by dropdown box. Many modules (News, all kinds of sections, reviews ...) could really profit from using a good pagenavigation instead of pagenumbers. So instead of doing this for every module by itself this should be a general function.

I am talking about something like this:




What do we have?

We have a class for pagenavigation ( \class\pagenav.php ) which can already handle navigation by numbers, selectbox and images.


Why isn´t it used if its already there?

Because we have a problem giving the required text to this selectbox. Lets say you write an article and use the [ pagebreak ] tag to separate the pages. Now if we were to use selectbox who tells the class what the names are for those pages?


What are you suggesting?

The solution could be either be a modification of the current pagebreak tag or creating an additional one. I belive it would be better to modify the existing one but i don´t have any idea if thats possible from a coding point of view.

So if it is possible to modify the current one and process it the suggestion could be to add a separator for further parameters. Here is an example:

Instead of just putting a [ pagebreak ] we could use a colon as separater and add the title we want like this: [ pagebreak:pagetitle ] e.g. [ pagebreak:Introduction ]

If this would be the road to go we could even think about further parameters like pagenumbers. Like this:

[ pagebreak:pagenumber:pagetitle ] e.g. [ pagebreak:1:Introduction ]


Now if a modification like this is not possible we could instead just think about creating a new tage like [ newpagebreak ] and use it the way described above.

-----------------------------------------------------

So far so good - now for the questions:

1. Is it technically possible to modify the current pagebreak handling to use the modifications?

2. Any major screw ups in the general idea?

3. Other parameters to suggest?

4. Other comments?[/size]

Hello Bender,

The subject is really interesting.
But theres' something I have problems to understand.
If you have, let say, a total of 20 pages of articles and
3 subjects, how can your list have a number ?

In my 20 pages, let say I have 15 pages for the first topic, 3 pages for the second and 5 for the last... ????

bye,
Hervé

Simple: Since you can use whatever label you want you could use the same or just extend it to the section of the article part you are in.

Here is a real life example:



As you can see they have a part 7 pages for the benchmarking part of their article. Devide in separately displayed pages.


Brought to my example above this would be

[ pagebreak:6:Bench mark Setup ]
[ pagebreak:7:Bench mark (Sandra) ]
[ pagebreak:8:Bench mark (Sciencemark) ]

and so on.

I have already worked on this for News version 2 but I tought you was talking, in a general maner, of all the XOOPS paginations.

Since i am not a coder i don´t know to which degree the pagebreak is processed by the core or by the modules.

So right now a module using the pagenav class would for example get back an array of the pagenumbers right?

So instead it should (optional) be possible to get back and display an array of descriptive pagenumbers as in the example.

So not every module developer has to code his own implementation but instead can use the one provided by core functions as the current pagenav.

Do i make sense?

Hi Bender.

Thank you for a very interesting thread.

Quote:

I could be wrong on this but I always thought that pagebreak was handled by the news modules (news and AMS) whilst the pagenav was a pagination was produced by the XOOPS core, which is module wide (if used by module developers).

I for one would love to see the pagebreak structure you have suggested.

Also for sometime I was thinking of adding an extra tag called [spotlight]sasad[/spotlight] to news articles that would be used to automatically display the tagged text of an article in the spotlight module. This, I believe, would be more flexible in defining what sections of news appears on the spotlight block, as opposed to selecting the first x characters or manually adding the text that is to be spotlighted.

Hervet, is this included in News 2? If not that I can volunteer to code this for you. Please email me if interested.

Cheers all.

McNaz.

Hello,

Quote:
and you are right.

Quote:
This is very interesting !
If you can/want to code it yes sure, do it.

bye,
Hervé

This could be discussed on the sf core dev forum

[Actually dropdown selection with page navigation is already implemented in XOOPS 2.2* for user edit if I understand the topic correctly.
It is also implemented in some modules, at least for article and cbb.] -- This was replied too soon. Although I did not understand it clearly but I am sure it is not for the same thing :)

We might need a cleaner and more generic one in XOOPS 2.3

Quote:

I know but to there were two reasons for starting it here:

1. i can easily use images and well formatted description
2. since it was planned for just getting some thoughts first before making this a well formulated requests
(i am a bit surprised (but happy too) that so far only coders have responded)

Quote:

I looked at many modules (including article) and none had this feature. Just installed it again and can´t find it.
But there was some bad on my explanation since i got things mixed up due to lack of some background information.
Will start this over in just some minutes ...

[size=x-small]Purpose of this thread:

Discussion of enhancing the current content navigation (prefered). Right now this if you have for example a news article and use the [ pagebreak ] to split it into parts you will just have the numbers to navigate the resulting pages.
Once the discussion here has been resolved either we found someone who is willing to do this along the way *hint hint* or we put the final draft on the feature request tracker and hope for the best. [/size]


Whats this about?

I believe we really lack in the area of contentnavigation by dropdown box. Many modules (News, all kinds of sections, reviews ...) could really profit from using a good contentnavigation instead of pagenumbers. So instead of doing this for every module by itself this should be a general function.

I am talking about something like this:





What are you suggesting?

The solution could be either be a modification of the current pagebreak tag or creating an additional one. I belive it would be better to modify the existing one but i don´t have any idea if thats possible from a coding point of view.

So if it is possible to modify the current one and process it the suggestion could be to add a separator (e.g. :)for further parameters. Here is an example:

Instead of just putting a [ pagebreak ] we could use a colon as separater and add the title we want like this: [ pagebreak:pagetitle ] e.g. [ pagebreak:Introduction ]

If this would be the road to go we could even think about further parameters like pagenumbers. Like this:

[ pagebreak:pagenumber:pagetitle ] e.g. [ pagebreak:1:Introduction ]


Now if a modification like this is not possible we could instead just think about creating a new tage like [ newpagebreak ] and use it the way described above.



-----------------------------------------------------


Here is a concrete example we will use a news article for. (remember it could be any content from any kind of module)


Here we have some articletext of a news article:



Now we use the modified pagebreak as described above and a dropdown box instead of pagenumbers:



Optionally we could use the extended version with pagenumbers added:



Now thats what i was originally talking about.

-----------------------------------------------------


So the question is:

- is there any way to provide a general function to do this and therefore allow any module writer to use this instead of everyone writing the code for this himself?



Problem:

I no longer believer we can just revamp the pagebreak. While creating the new example images i found a flaw in my suggestion. That would be that there is never a pagebreak for the first part of text otherwise we would have a blank page inside the navigation.

So i guess we would need to create a new/different tag to create this kind of function



Note:

The dropdown box is just an example. Of course instead of the dropdown box with the data retrieved from the tag you could create a list of descriptive links or anything else.