[Feature Request] Sections vs Categories

[danieli]

This is a great component, however, it would be extremely ideal for me if it could allow for the picking/filtering of Categories as opposed to just Sections.

Joomla! is our Intranet and we have used Sections to define Departments. It would be awesome if the Department could see all of its Articles in a Phoca Doc page that filtered on that Department's (Section) Categories.

Each Category would be listed as a table on the page, each with a list of Articles within it.

[Jan]

Hi, maybe I don't understand it 100% ... you can see all the articles only in one section now... ?

[danieli]

Your component works perfectly as it was designed, what I am suggesting is a new way to extend the functionality that would make the component ideal in my environment, and possibly for others.

I guess the easiest way to describe it is to give the option to bypass Sections all together, and assign a list of Category ID's for the component to show instead. The function would remain similar, in that a table will be drawn for each Category selected, and that each would contain a list of Articles from within that Category.

And just like today where you select Categories to filter in/out of the Section... another filter could be very useful to filter Articles in/out of the Category. This way I could choose to exclude certain Articles from being displayed.

This way, when the Phoca Doc menu option is clicked, the page is rendered with multiple tables (as always), the heading of each table are the selected Categories, the body of each table contains a list of Articles within that Category, and the bottom of the page shows the "most viewed Articles" (as it does today). In this scenario, a Section is meaningless and not used.

The reason this is more meaningful to me in our "intranet" (internal organization web-site) is that a Section denotes a Department. The Department generally does not want to see PhocaDoc page that includes another Department's (Sections) Categories or Articles. So if I use Phoca Doc the way it is today, I would create one PhocaDoc menu option per Department (Section) with a filter for it's specific Section... which would result in a Phoca Doc page with only one Section/table... which is pretty close to the default Joomla behaviour of showing the list of Categories for a Section... so I have gained nothing. If the page showed a list of (multiple) Categories with their Articles right away... then I would have a powerful new component.

What we have done today for one Department is create an Article called "Common Links", where the Publisher keeps adding a new link whenever they add a new Article to their Section/Category that they feel is useful and "note worthy". If your componet worked the way I have suggested above, it would 100% replace this manual process that the user is currently doing. Once set with their Category filters, the PhocaDoc page will render will all Articles that have been filtered to show (all => no filter, specific => id in "1,2,3", or exclude => id not in "1,2,3"). A beautiful thing!

[Jan]

Ok, now I understand, just adding new view Articles similar to view Sections, I added it into a feature request list...

Jan

[danieli]

Wonderful!

[luthien]

what is the status of this feature request?

[Jan]

Hi, still planned - see the reasons in this forum