Copyright Joel Verks @ 2008

This is the readme file of my modified version of the original Category Editor 1.7 posted on the mnogosearch download site. mnogosearch is an opensource search engine, found at mnogosearch.org (where else?)

The only modifications I did for this version were:

• made Category Editor work with php4 by adding $_POST and $_GET assignments to global variables since when the original code was written (2000?) , the version of php used had by default globals turned on and you could access form variables without reference to a server array ( which was an ugly, ugly security hole) . There may still need to be some tweaks, but the editor seemed to work for me for adding categories, subcategories, and symlinks.
• split out the database connection paramaters so you could put them in a directory outside of the doc root for security reasons. I did this by editing config.php and moving the database username and password to the db_config.inc.php file. This means that when you install my version, you need to update config.php to use the correct include path tp the db_config.inc.php file.

There is no support provided, and at this time , I don't even intend on releasing this except for my own use.

- Joel
jverks@hackcandy.com

Categories

Notes on Categories: a mailing list post indicated that symlinks do not work on versions 1.3.x or above. I'm not sure if this is true, since it was an old reply.

For a detailed explanation of categories, see the docs:

The official mnogosearch docs http://www.mnogosearch.org/doc/msearch-subsections.html#categories are somewhat confusing (for me), so here is a bottoms up approach at explaining the category scheme:

Categories are contained in the ‘categories’ table.  There are 4 fields,
rec_id, path, link, and name

rec_id = id of the database record

path  = a hex value that identifies where the category lies in the hierarchy or category ‘tree’ . 01 would mean the first main category (or branch), 0102 would mean the second subcategory (or leaf) of the first main category. 0A02 is the second leaf on the 10th branch. See the examples below for additional clarification

link = applies only to a link record.

• A link record can be identified by the last 2 characters of the record’s path field which are @@.
  In other words, the path of a link record must follow the same hierarchy naming convention of any category but will only contain the path up to its parent, and instead of assigning itself a ‘leaf’ identification, it will be assigned @@. So whereas a category’s path might be 0601 to indicate that it’s the first subcategory under the 6th main category , a link under the 06 category would instead have a path of 06@@ . See examples below for additional clarification

name = name of the category.

an example of a category table is shown below.

By looking at the path column of the above categories table above, we can tell:

• The main categories are toys, wine, gadgets, music, movies, autos
• action is a sub category under movies
• electronics and machina are links

• electronics is a link to gadgets (as indicated by the ‘02’ in the link column for electronics which is actually the path of ‘gadgets’
• machina is a link to cars (as indicated by the ‘06’ in the link column for machina which is actually the path of ‘cars’

• @@ indicates that machina is at the very top of the hierarchy since its ‘parent’ path is empty.
  In figuring out the link path, you would add the parent path to @@:
  link path = ‘parent path’ + ‘@@’ or in this case, just @@

As an additional example, if we wanted to create a hierarchy like this:
Vehicles as the main category, Autos as a subcategory, and cars and machina as links to autos, the table would look like this:

 (not all rows are shown)

Here’s a screenshot of what the Category Editor would look like after configuring the above example:

The category editor is a download from mnogosearch and is a php script that provides a nice GUI to create categories and links.

This was originally created for mnogosearch 1.3.x and php v ancient history :) ( before apparently  there were $_GET and $_POST arrays and globals turned off be default).

 I fixed the form posting so it will work with at least PHP 4, and this readme should be included in the tar of the fixed version

How To Create a a Category and Subcategory in the Category Editor

1. create the categories by entering in each category under ‘new category’ and clicking insert.
2. To create a subcategory, simply click the category after creation, and then create the subcategory

How to Create a Link in the Category Editor:

1. Click to the level where you want to create the link.
2. enter in the name of the link in the ‘New symlink’ field, click ‘Insert’
   
   Note that this just creates the link record, but does not actually tell the link record which category to point to
   
3. Point the link to the category you want it linked to:
1. under ‘link path’ , enter in the path of the category you want to link to .  To find the link path, look at the category you want to point the link to, and find its path field. Enter in that path field into the ‘Link path’ field of the link record.
   For the example above, you would enter in 0601 to point the ‘cars’ link to category ‘autos’ since the path for ‘autos’ is 0601