Topics What is it exactly?

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Can someone explain what topics are exactly?

If I look at the block description it says: "Displays a list of your site's topics, allowing you to click on them to filter a page list."
That is confusing to me.
So what are they for?
How can I add some content to a topic?
Is it strictly bound to a blogs page?
Why my own topic tree isn't shown in the pages attribute settings?
...

Unfotunately there is nothing in the docs.

daenu
 
exchangecore replied on at Permalink Reply
exchangecore
daenu replied on at Permalink Reply
daenu
thank you but this is not really answering what I am looking for. Maybe I wasn't quite clear in my post. It's not on how to create them but what exaclty is it? Is it a filter? A dynamic page?
frz replied on at Permalink Best Answer Reply
frz
The goal with topics was to deliver a tree of tags that could be used against anything..

So tags, free form text strings, are joined to data types all across the web for all sorts of stuff. (go check flickr).
That's cool, but "horse", "horses", "equine", and "pony" are really all the same thing, or at least closer to one another than "monkey" - but you'd never know with the free form texty nature of tags..

The idea behind topics was to create trees.. so:
Equine
+-- Horses
+-- Horse
+-- Pony
+-- etc..

Now if you say somthing is a "pony", a programmer can work their way up the tree and infer that means their' equine as well.

Thats the idea, in broad strokes.
daenu replied on at Permalink Reply
daenu
Thank you. Now I've an idea of it (In broad strokes) ;-)
OKDnet replied on at Permalink Reply
OKDnet
To add a bit, Topics are a special type of Attribute.
And I'd say that yes, a common (if not main) use would be to filter with.

Of course Categories for Blog Entries is obvious, but anything that could/should be categorized and filtered could potentially benefit from their use.
A3020 replied on at Permalink Reply
A3020
Interesting. I've never used this, but it seems handy. Do you have a real world example maybe? Of how this looks in the dashboard and front-end?
OKDnet replied on at Permalink Reply
OKDnet
To do this, basically there are 3 pieces working together
1- The Topics (attribute) setup
2- A Page list block, with the setting "Enable Other Blocks to Filter This Page List" selected.
3- A Topic List Block (which is the other block that does the filtering just mentioned in #2)

I'm using this now, but I'm not ready to show the site yet.
Here's a theme demo using it on a page (the GALLERIES & PORTFOLIOS filtered list)
http://longwayhome57.15robots.com/...

Instructions on how it was done here (see the section "How to add an animated filter?")
http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/themes/long-way-home1/document...
and additional "Tutorial" instructions here
http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/themes/long-way-home1/tutorial...

As for the back end, see
http://documentation.concrete5.org/editors/in-page-editing/block-ar...