Description:

The "Related Items" wobject allows you to create arbitrary relationships between pages on (and outside) your WebGUI installation in a streamlined way.

You can think of the "Related Items" wobject as a souped-up semantically-aware Link List, with some "sugar" on top to make creating intra-site relationships simpler. It keeps track of "trackbacks" between pages: if a page with the same relationship type links to the current page, you can have this "Reverse Relationship" enumerated.

This Wobject uses templates, has developed help files and uses the WebGUI internationalization features.

From the docs:

"Related Items" relate pages within and outside of this WebGUI installation. You can create different types of relations and pages that relate to each other in the same way are "aware" of it via the "Relation Type" settings. These similar relationships between Wobjects can be automatically enumerated by turning on "Reverse Relations" for any "Related Items" Wobject.

Practical Examples:

• Translations: Pages can be "translations" of each other,
• Complementary: Pages can be "complementary" to each other. If you're reading about "cars" you might want to read about "car repair" as well,
• Contradictory: Pages can contradict each other- point/counterpoint style. If you're reading a page about Evolution, you can link to Creationist pages.

I'm currently using it in WebGUI 5.5.4 and 5.4.4

Installation:

Copy the "RelatedItems.pm" file into your "WebGUI/Wobject/" directory, edit your ".conf" file to include the "RelatedItems" Wobject, and feed the SQL file to your database.

Update- 2004-2-20:
Sigh. There were a few bugs in the first released version. Version 1.0 has corrected these.

Update- 2005-3-17
The "missing linked root" problem has been fixed with the 1.1 release. This has not been ported to the 6.x branch yet.

Comments

edv: "Very nice wobject.  I like it.  However, I'm having some difficulties getting the external links to work.  Is there a known problem with the posted version? (NOTE: I'm assuming it hasn't been updated since the original posting.)  I see the values in the database, but don't see the links on the screen.

Thanks,"

dpuro: "
Please use the corrected version 1.0 above and see if your problem disappears. On an external link,  if you don't specific the title the URL you enter should be used for display.

If, after trying the new one you can't get it to work, can you post back a URL of a page you're using this on?
"

nicklous20: "
This is a bug report.

I have WebGUI 5.5.4 & Related Items installed.  I created a related item that pointed to an existing web page.  Then I created a shortcut (WobjectProxy) to that related item so I could display that same item on a different part of the same web page, using a different template.  This worked quite well and I was very impressed.  Then I tried to duplicate this process on another web page (on another computer). 

As soon as I added the RelatedItem (not the Wobject container, but rather the individual item... the second "save" button), I got an error message saying something couldn't be processed in "session.pm".  Oddly, after receiving this message, I could no longer display the original web page I had created (getting the same error when it tried to display the page).

Since I couldn't fix the problem easily, I had to go to the "Manage Page Tree" administrative function to delete the RelatedItems Wobjects.  After just deleting those Wobjects, the pages rendered normally again.

I expect this Wobject will be probably be updated after the WebGUI 6.0 release (which is supposed to merge Items and Articles)... So I thought you should know about this problem when doing your updating.
"

dpuro: "
This should be fixed in the latest released version in the parent.
"

bottelberghs: "Hi, I'm interested in using this wobject to maintain a multi language site. For this I want to relate pages on the same subject, in different languages. This works fine when I link to non-root pages.
I also want to relate the root pages: home_english and home_dutch. However, the related items don't show up  in the list when a root page is selected for the item. This way you aren't able to edit/delete them anymore (but they  remain in the database). Is this a bug or is there a solution for this?

TIA,

-leendert"

PatrickB: "Is this Wobject compatible with WebGUI"

dpavlin: "This seems like interesting Wobject. I'm also using 6.x so I'll try to fix it.

I can't promise much, since this is my first Wobject which I try to tickle, but I'll report my progess...
"