Using Categories

The most important feature of the Notebook is the ability to use Wikidot categories, along with live templates and data forms. In the old notebook template from 2009, everything was stuck into a single category: the notebook category. Now, you may create any number of categories and still include them in the notebook itself.

We are going to assume that you already know about categories, live templates, and data forms. If you do not, be sure to look at the help docs covering these topics:

Creating a Category

Everything necessary for the notebook's operation is kept safely in the side bar. Therefore, you do not need to worry about including special code when creating a new category or _template page. You only need to do as you normally would.

Creating a Page

If you read about Creating Subpages, then you know that in the Admin Panel is a form used to add subpages. This form allows you to specify the category of the new page you are creating. This category need not exist yet for the page to be formed.

By default, the Category field is filled in with the current category. So, for instance, if you were to click on the Admin Panel right now and take a peak at the Add Subpage section, you will see that the Category field is filled in with notebook. You can, of course, always change that when desired.

We chose to do that since, more often than not, topics and their subtopics will be in the same category, and hence this preemptive fill can be a minor convenience. However, we did provide a way for you to specify a different default category if desired.

Alternate Default Categories

Let's say that you have an extremely large topic like Mathematics which you put in the subject category. All of its subtopics and their subpages should go into the mathematics category (so that they are separate from History pages), but if you try to create a page from the Mathematics page, by default new subtopics will be put into the subject category. You could always replace subject with mathematics in the Category field each time you want to make a page, but that can be a minor nuisance.

Therefore, you can specify a new default category for a particular page using a special tag called the category tag. The category tag is of the form _c:category, where you replace category with the category name you want to use. This is added to the page's list of tags (see Tagging).

So, in the scenario above, you would add the _c:mathematics tag. Now when you open the Admin Panel, the default category will be mathematics.

For an example of this in action, see the CSS Management page.

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