Red Queen Review Engine User Manual CATEGORY RECORDS

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• CATEGORY RECORDS
• Creating a Category
• Editable Category Fields
• Editable Non-Category Fields
• Adding New Category Fields

CATEGORY RECORDS

Each Category in your database will consist of a single record in the Category table. If you use any other application to examine the Category table, don't forget that the literal table name in your database will be prefixed (for example, with the string 'rq_'). Before you can even add your first Item into your database you must create at least one Category with which it will be associated. Categories can be created, then assigned to Editors who then handle Item and Review submissions for the Category.

Once you have entered a Category into the Category table, and it has been allocated a Category ID of, say, 9, then you can navigate to the Category detail page via the browsable Item pages, or you can enter the URL to the Category detail page directly into your browser, like so:

http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/path/to/...
	/redqueen/do/redqueen.cgi?module=find_item&category_id=101

Creating a Category

To create a Category you can either visit the Database control panel in the administrative area, or visit the Categories control panel--that is, the Category Item Browser. To get there, enter the URL of your admin directory into the address bar of your browser. The URL will be something like:

http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/path/to/.../redqueen/do/admin/admin.cgi

Your administrative directory should be directory-protected, but once you have logged into the directory look for the Database link in the administrative navigation bar (we'll assume we're going to work directly with the Database control panel, simply because the interface for that is a little more complex than for the Category Browser so we might as well cover it here). After you click on the Database link you'll see a Database menu of table names on the left side of the page. Select 'Category' from the menu of table names. You also need to select an action before pressing the button to load the right Database frame: select 'Add' from the action menu then click on the submit button. When the frame on the right side of the page loads you will see all the fields that can be specified when you create a Category. Unless you have already got around to adding new fields to the Category table you will be presented with a form that looks something like the following (example input values have been added for clarity, and are explained below):

Name
Subcategory of	-- --Root-- Baseball Baseball/Stuff For Sale
Description	Anything and Everything to do with Baseball Cards.
Keywords	Baseball, Baseball Card
Template Prefix
Image
Is Validated	Yes No

Editable Category Fields

The following Category fields appear both on the Add Category and Modify Category pages, however the last field displayed above--Is Validated--only appears when the Administrator or an Editor is logged in.

Name When you name a Category, you name it locally. That is, you provide the name of the Category relative to some parent Category. In the example, "Baseball/Stuff For Sale" is the parent Category, and "Baseball Cards" is the name of the new Category. The full name of the newly-created Category will be "Baseball/Stuff For Sale/Baseball Cards". Clearly, you cannot include a / in your Category name (as / is the Category delimiter), otherwise you will get an error message. The column is Category.name

Subcategory of
Each Category is either a topmost Category, or it has a parent Category. If you add a topmost Category, select "--Root--" for the value of the parent Category. Otherwise select the parent Category in which you wish to create your new Category. It is the ID of the parent Category which is actually stored, not the parent Category name itself. The corresponding column is Category.parent_id

Description
The Description for a Category is entirely optional. If defined, the description will appear beneath the Category breadcrumbs on pages which list either Categories, or the content of a Category. The description can also be toggled off from the Build / Browse frame of the Configure control panel. The column is Category.description

Keywords
The Keywords field is an optional string of comma-delimited words or phrases that will be used to populate metadata tags in the static version of the browsable Category pages. Their purpose is thus to help spiders correctly index your web pages. This is a VARCHAR(255) column, meaning that the length of the field is limited to 255 characters. The column is Category.keywords

Template Prefix
The Template Prefix is an experimental column, not particularly recommended for use. If, for example, you supply the value "blue" for the Template Prefix (instead of leaving it blank) the 2 Category-related templates named find_item.ttml and find_item_list.ttml will NOT be processed in the usual way, and Red Queen will look for the templates named blue_item.ttml and blue_item_list.ttml instead. Thus you would need to create these two new templates before attempting to use them. So if you really want to use a different set of templates for a given Category, this is one way to do it. The column is Category.template_prefix

Image
The Image field is optional and is based on an INT (integer) column which acts as a foreign key to the Upload table. To add an image to the Category record (it should be a small image which establishes a setting without pushing everything else around it out of place) you click on the button marked "Manage Upload" and a dialog box appears requesting information about the file to be uploaded. Once you have uploaded the image, a MIME icon and the name of the image file will appear on the Category record form itself, verifying that the image file is available before you even submit the Category record to the database. If you have enabled automatic image thumbnailing, a thumbnail of the uploaded image will also be stored along with the unscaled image. The column is Category.category_image

Is Validated
The Is Validated field toggles between "Yes" and "No". A Category will only appear on public pages if it is validated. The column is Category.is_validated

Editable Non-Category Fields

In addition to the Category fields shown above, there may be other non-Category fields which appear on the Add Category and Modify Category pages. The Administrator is able to modify the collection of rating attributes (or types) associated with a Category (which we term a Rating Template), so an extra form element will be present to handle this and will look something like the following (this demo form element is functional so you can play it):

Rating Questions RatingType Pool How do you rate the Customer Support? How do you rate [* thing *]? How well does the expert know the games? How well versed is the expert on game rules? How would you rate the Value For Money? Would you recommend it to a friend?

Once you have created a Category, and provided you have assigned rating attributes to its Rating Template, you will see something like the following list, which spells out the component attributes of the Rating Template, and informs you as to whether or not these attributes are inherited from the immediate parent Category (only the case if attributes are not assigned explicitly):

Rating Template

Inherited:  Yes To assign (or remove) rating attributes, use the box to transfer rating attributes from the Rating Type Pool Summary of Currently ACTIVE rating types   Type 1   Attribute:   Overall Form Question:   How do you rate [* thing *]? Rank DESC:   Highest Rating Rank ASC:   Lowest Rating Form Values:   1 star, 2 stars, 3 stars, 4 stars, 5 stars Values:   1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Thus, even if you assign NO rating attributes, the Category will inherit a default Rating Template consisting of just one attribute. Here we see that this default rating attribute allows for rating values from 1 to 5. This is the "Overall" rating attribute, and the rating question that goes with it is "How do you rate [* thing *]?" (note: [* thing *] will get replaced by the name of an Item when it appears on public pages). If you want to assign replacement rating attributes to the Category, transfer the desired set from the pool of available rating attributes (or types). If you need to create new Rating Types, you can create the Category first, then go create the Rating Types, and afterwards modify the Category to include the new Rating Types. Or you can create all conceivable Rating Types first, then create your Categories.

The procedure for creating a Rating Type is covered elsewhere in RATING TYPES and should be read with care before you begin populating the Rating Template for a given Category. Briefly, a Rating Type is represented by a record in the RatingType table, and specifies the definition for a ratable attribute. These attributes can then be associated with a Category, a Team, or a Yellow Page. Once you have defined the Rating Template for a Category, adding new rating attributes after you have begun collecting ratings can result in what appears to be only partially-supplied rating information for some records (those collected before the latest attribute was added). So give some thought to the construction of your Rating Templates ahead of time, so as to reduce the likelihood of having to change them later on.

In addition to the inheritance of Rating Templates, the Editor for a given Category is also inherited if not explicitly assigned. See EDITORS for the full story on Editor assignments (which is NOT done through the form for Adding or Modifying a Category record, but by directly loading the Add page for the CategoryEditor table). Once you have assigned an Editor for the Category, you will see something like this on the page:

Editor Assignment

Inherited:  Yes To assign (or remove) editors, use the Database menu on the left to select the CategoryEditor table Summary of Assigned Editors (ordered by rank)   Editor 1   Username:   admin Email:   admin@nospam.com ID:   1

Adding New Category Fields

If you need to add extra fields to the Category table you can do this. For detailed information on the process of adding columns to existing tables, see ADDING COLUMNS TO A TABLE.

If you add columns which are used by some Categories and not others you can test for the column value before displaying it in any template which receives Category information. For example, if you add a Category.warning column that is used in adult-related Categories you can test with something like this:

	[% category = alias.category_info %]

	[% IF category.warning %]
		WARNING: [% category.warning %]
	[% END %]

Note: in practice you will have to search for the relevant category hash to reference. It might, for example, be current_level.category_info which is buried in a category loop somewhere within one of the Template-Toolkit templates used for the browsable Category pages.

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