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ADDING CATEGORIES
Creating a Category
Once Clare has installed Red Queen and confirmed that her configuration variables are all set to appropriate values, the first thing she is going to want to do is add categories to her Red Queen database. Categories are discussed in depth in the Red Queen Manual, where the emphasis is on adding/editing categories via the Database control panel. In this tutorial will we approach the same problem by using the Category Browser. The Browser is designed to allow the Administrator (or assigned category editors) to perform category operations by interacting with the category tree, which remains visible on the left of the page in a separate frame.
To get to the Category Browser Clare enters the administrative area of Red Queen by typing a URL into her web browser something like:
http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/path/to/.../redqueen/do/admin/admin.cgi
She then looks for the Category Browser, which can be accessed from the far left link in the navigation bar entitled Categories. When she clicks on it she sees a new page with a bare folder named Home on the left. This represents the top level of the (currently empty) category tree. It should look something like this:
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Home |
Clare clicks on the Home folder and a single link appears on the right of the page entitled "Add Category". She clicks again and sees a form for adding a category. To create a top-level category named "Animation" she fills in the form like so:
An asterisk indicates a required field. At a minimum, the category requires a "Name". When a category is created the supplied "Name" field cannot contain the forward slash / as this is the character used to delimit components of a category. If Clare sets the "Is Validated" field, the created category will appear on public pages. Otherwise it is only accessible to her. If a category "Description" is provided it can be placed on the public pages. It can also be hidden by toggling the appropriate configuration variable from the administrative configuration pages. If a category "Description", or category "Keywords", are provided, these will be used to fill the metadata fields for the category when static pages are built. This helps spiders index your pages more accurately. These two fields also assist in the functioning of the internal Red Queen search engine.
As Clare does, you should ignore the "Template Prefix" field (consider it an advanced feature which can be used to bypass the default category templates). For now, Clare also ignores the section of the form containing the "Rating Questions" which control which rating attributes are assigned to the category. To simplify things, this section of the form has been ignored in the current discussion. We will come back to the rating questions later, once the category is created. If desired, an "Image" can also be assigned to the category by clicking on the Manage Upload button and using the dialog box that appears to upload an image. In general, if you want to add an image to each category, it would probably be wise to delay this until you have come up with a series of images, all of the same size and style, which can be used to decorate the categories in a uniform way. For the purposes of our discussion Clare decides not to bother with category images.
When Clare submits the Add Category form the category is created and the Category Browser automatically updates to display the new configuration:
  Home |
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Animation (0) |
The zero in the parentheses on the right of the new Animation category indicates that there are no items in the category yet. We postpone for the moment the task of creating items to populate the new category, and instead allow Clare to click on the "Add Category" link on the right of the page to create another category beneath Animation, to be named Feature Films. She goes through the same procedure as before, fills in the form, supplying Feature Films for the "Name" field, and submitting. The new Animation > Feature Films category is created, and the Category Browser updates to reflect the category addition:
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Home |
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Animation (0) |
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Feature Films (0) |
It is always a good idea to plan out the intended category tree before one begins adding them to the database. However, categories can be moved or deleted if needed, and Clare would find the links to perform these operations on the right side of the page once a given category is added. At this point we stop and move onto the next task, which is to define the various rating attributes to associate with each category.
Next Section: ADDING RATING ATTRIBUTES
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