Dan decided to use Wikka Wiki. When I asked why he didn’t use Media Wiki (the software that Wikipedia uses, which seems to be the de-facto standard), he said it required PHP 5, which our server doesn’t have. I guess that was a good-enough reason.

For all my niggles with Wikka Wiki, it is actually pretty standards compliant and has a cute name. The main issue with Wikka Wiki, which might be an issue with all wikis (I wouldn’t know since this is the first one I’ve ever coded on), is how it stores links from one page to another. It has a links table with a from_tag and to_tag. This is logical and works quite well until you try to do bread crumbs.

When you send a query to get every link that should go on a page, recursive links aren’t a problem. When you are trying to make a recursive function to get a bread crumb trail, it is quite annoying. Since Dan was in a hurry, he just did 10 left joins on the same table with a limit of one. That got the job done but didn’t always show a logical or short-route path to the current page. Dan decided that I was better at recursive functions and told me to work on it when I had time (except he calls them cookie crumbs instead of bread crumbs, which you’ll see in the code). After about 10 tries, I came up with the following:

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function BuildCookieCrumbs2($page, $depth=0, $menu=array("CareerOpportunities","DefaultMenu","CurrentFrontPage")){
	if($depth > 10)
		return;
	if(in_array($page,$menu)){
		return $page;
	}
	$sql = "SELECT to_tag, from_tag FROM career_opportunities_links WHERE from_tag IN ('".implode("','",$menu)."')";
	$r = $this->Query("SET NAMES UTF8");
	$r = $this->Query($sql);
	$o = array();
	$f = array();
	while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($r)){
		$o[] = $row["to_tag"];
		$f[] = $row["from_tag"];
	}
	if($ret = array_search($page,$o)){
		return $f[$ret].">".$o[$ret];
	}
	else{
		$ret = "";
		$bcc = $this->BuildCookieCrumbs2($page,$depth+1,$o);
		$ret .= $bcc;
		$tmp = explode(">",$ret);
		$sql = "SELECT FIND_IN_SET(from_tag,'".implode(",",$menu)."') as fis FROM career_opportunities_links WHERE from_tag IN ('".implode("','",$menu)."') AND to_tag = '".$tmp[0]."'";
		$r = $this->Query("SET NAMES UTF8");
		$r = $this->Query($sql);
		$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($r);
		$ret = $menu[$row["fis"]-1].">".$ret;
		if(in_array($page,$tmp)){
			return $ret;
		}
	}
	return $ret;
}
function BuildCookieCrumbs($page) {
	$ret = $this->BuildCookieCrumbs2($page);
	$ret = explode(">",$ret);
	unset($ret[0]);
	return array_values($ret);
}

These two functions can be dropped into the Wakka.class.php file. I have no idea how to call it and put it into the template, as that part was already done when I started working on it. Sending the current page will return an array of tags to use in the bread crumb trail. You’ll probably want to change the default menu array in the BuildCookieCrumbs2, as it is set up to reflect our site.

This may not be the best solution, but it works pretty well.