by bfauska on Sat Mar 25, 2006 5:55 pm This has been requested partially many times in the past, and I think that this solution would fit many needs at once, including knocking several items off of Colby's list.
When setting up the way a catagory is displayed, I wish we could call out a starting point for the display of the catagory on screen. An example of this would be setting the "Catagory start point" at entry number x. With this feature you could set up a page to always start at the begining of the catagory, or if you had a catagory with 5 columns and it showed 4 rows (for example) you could set the "Catagory start point" at "entry # 21" and display page two.
I think the best implimentation of this would be to have the "start point" as a setting in the catagory tab, AND as something that could be called out with an event. This way the catagory would show whatever you wanted it to when you first opened that page, and you could add buttons to display specific sections on command. This would also allow multiple relevant instances of the same catagory to be displayed at once, with each one set to a different place in the list.
If this feature could also have more choices than "entry number" it would be very powerful. Some examples of other "Catagory start point" options would be:
"selection>-x" where x is the number of catagory items before (-x) or after (+x) the selection you wish to see. This would allow for the selection to always be at a specific location on the screen with the catagory scrolling around it. This would also enable you to display two instances of the same catagory on one page with one showing several items before the selection and another showing items after the selection, allowing a visual gap in the catagory for you to insert buttons or information relevant to the current selection.
"alphabet>A" where A is the letter you would like the display to start with. This would allow the user to set up pages that show the catagory starting with the first item whose title starts with the a specific letter. With an event this would allow users to set the "catagory start point" with buttons that jump to parts of the alphabet.
"page>x" where x is the page number of the catagory (dependant on the layout) that you want displayed. With an event this would allow buttons that jumped to specific pages. It would also be nice if "page>last" worked for calling out the last page in a catagory, because as our catagorys grow it would be difficult to constantly update our events and catagory displays. "page>current+x" or "page>current-x" would also be nice for use as events to make faster scrolling with page number buttons, similar to how many forum search functions work on the web.
One last aspect of this feature that I think would be benifical would be the ability to select whether the catagory display is continuous or fixed.
Continuous would make the catagory into a closed loop where the last item in the catagory is IMMEDIATELY followed by the first, with no empty space on the page, this way when you used "catagory start point alphabet>z" the page would display all of the Z titles and then continue on to display the A titles without having to jump to the next page. This would be even more important in the "selection>+/-" uses so that the user could cycle continuously through the list with out getting stuck.
Fixed would display the catagory in a fashion similar to the current way where when you reached the end of the list you would only show the end and not continue back to the begining.
I think that this aproach to catagory displays would accomplish the most flexability with the least work. The concept in my head (and hopefully described above) would be fairly easy for skin builders to use. I would love to help iron out any wrinkles in my idea or add to it if people would like to discuss more in this thread.
Thanks for your time.
Brian
P.S. <brown noseing>
Stephen, I think your product is already the most versatile front end around, and that these features would only make it better.
</brown noseing>
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