Jim Laurino wrote:
I started a log of my thinking and exploration related to this topic at wikipedia User:AJim/extensions.
I looked at the v 1.18 tables.sql categorylinks table, and I think the cl_sortkey index is right on track to support the kind of functionality I was looking for.
I am pretty new to this stuff. Will the changes that Brion just made appear on the test wiki soon?
Already there, I installed it a few minutes after checking it in.
By default, the sort key will be the name of the article. That is, in an article "Linus Torvalds", a category link [[Category:Programmer]] will confer the sort key "Linus_Torvalds", and when you look at the list of programmers at Category:Programmer he'll appear under the L's.
If you override it, say [[Category:Programmer|Torvalds, Linus]], then he'll be sorted in the T's, though he'll still be listed as "Linus Torvalds".
(It's currently an ugly binary search and should get improved to something that's at least case-insensitive and ideally language-targetted. MySQL's limited language settings mean we'll have to manage that ourselves, making binary sort keys from the text.)
Categories can be nested in a tree structure, though the display is currently a bit awkward for that. There is not (yet) any specific navigation support for being "in" a category, though perhaps that's something that could get added somehow.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)