This page is important, please read it from top to bottom.
This is a testproject to try the ideas for kempies.org, or any database-like website here on wikidot. Main goal is to be able to create 'objects' with properties with a 1 to many relation, and to make this system as generic as possible. This would include the following:
- a user can create new objects like sports, players, teams, artobjects….
- these objects can be used to define eachother like a player (object) from a team (other object)
- the system needs to be manageable both for admin as for user. Selecting an item in a pulldown from 1000 items is NO option.
- …
My idea is the following structure:
For every database Frank wants a different domein. This is not for technical reasons, but for marketing reasons. He is confident that a domein name like www.XXXXonwiki.org is best for the market we are targetting. Therefore we first need to buy a domein : xyz-on-wiki.org. When these databases become a succes, people other than us will buy domein names of the structure xyz-on-wiki.org… and this may cause financial problems, since we then need to buy these domein names from those people. But imagen we have a domein named xyz-on-wiki.org.
This domein needs to be redirected to wikidot. I am not sure if a domein can be redirected to a certain page, so I assume that for each xyz-on-wiki.org we will create a xyz-on-wiki.wikidot.com.
It would be cool if this would work. Well it works, but for now we only have domeins that are redirected to an empty site. So I need to explain the problem if we would stop here.
We would like to show interesting information on the pages of the databases: for example a database of football players would also mention in wich team this player played during his career. But as you can feel… what makes a football player more worthy then a football team to have it's own database? Why is there no database for football teams?
Well there is no reason and that is why it should not be implemented like this. Every thing you can think of could be categorized. So every thing should be able to get a database. In our structurethat would mean a domein and a wikidot website. If we have the financial means to pay for all these domeins and we can make as many wikidot sites as we want… we are still not without problems.
Why is this? BECAUSE WIKIDOT FUNCTIONALLITY DOES NOT ALLOW THE CREATE LISTS THAT ARE BASED ON DATA THAT IS SITUATED ON AN OTHER SITE!! It's important to understand this so I will give an example of what is not possible.
Lets take Jean-Marie Pfaff a famous Belgian goalkeeper. What's interesting to know about this man?
- He is a goalkeeper meaning a person that is part of a football team.
- Football is a sport so that sport is stored in the sports-on-wiki-database
- He is Belgian, a nationality that is stored in the nationalities-on-wiki-database
- He played for several teams wich are stored in the teams-on-wiki-database
- These teams played in countries wich are stored in the locations-on-wiki-database
- …
It is possible to pull one item from those other databases, we can do it with a CSI (Cross Site Include) but it is IMPOSSIBLE to pull a list of items. there is no CSLP-module (Cross Site ListPages-module). So this would leave us with the fact that Jean-Marie can only have played for one team.
The only way I think we can solve this is to use a mother-site that collects ALL the information. This site is the testzone for this idea. The different wikidot-sites (xyz-on-wiki.wikidot.com) are redirected to a category in this site. So if you go to www.xyzonwiki.org you will pass xyzonwiki.wikidot.com and end up at megaproject.wikidot.com/xyz:_start
If a user will now enter all the data concerning an object, all those items are stored in one website and we can pull list from all these items.
The following problem that needs to be solved is how are we going to create GENERIC forms and pages. It is not our intent to create forms and pages for every new object-type a user wants, so we need to think of a way to let the user do this in a simple way HIM(HER)SELF.
I am still working on this.
First problem I was faced with is the fact that the same information can be edited from different locations. For example if you are in the teamsOW-DB (teamsOnWiki-DataBase) you can edit a team. If you save the page you would normally land on the saved team info. If you however are looking at the playersOW-DB at the list of teams a player played for and you see a spelling error you should be able to correct this and after saving the info of the team in the teamOW-DB, you wish to land on the page of the player on the playersOW-DB you were looking at. You could argue that the BACK button should do this. Well it does but then you will first go to the edit-mode of a page again, and this is something we wish to avoid I think.
Second problem is the manipulation of the ridget structure of the form. The issue's here:
- The label of the title-field can not be adjusted. Our objects have names, not titles. So we need to eliminate the title-field from the form. HOWEVER the title is used in the breadcrumbs so we NEED it…
- There is no way to integrate wiki-source into a label
- There is no way to put a suiting title above a form