[Zope-CMF] content management framework question / musings

[Tres Seaver]

Frank McGeough wrote:

> The CMF allows a user to login, to have an area that they can add content to
> and that works o.k.
> 
> My question is, how does all this content actually become part of a whole?
> If you take content like News -- it is totally integrated. That is, a user

> adds a News Item and once it's published, it's available. It doesn't matter
> if the user decides to move it to another folder --- the News Item is still
> picked up and displayed in the proper places. Events are somewhat similar.


Notice that both the "news" box and the calendar work this way because
they are built on "canned" catalog queries.  You can accomplish similar
organization of your documents by adding Topic objects, for instance,
assuming they have been tagged with appropriate metadata.


> For document content things are left to the user. Search provides a
> wonderful level of integration, of course, but that is a (very useful but)
> poor substitute for intelligent organization (in my opinion). Since this is
> the case it seems like my users should actually be roles.  That is, if I was
> working on a newspaper type model --- I would have a sports user, an
> editorial user, etc. The main menu would link the person browsing the site
> to these sections. The section would have a main DTML document that would
> layout the section and show the current available content. This main DTML
> would always be available. The main DTML document would have to have logic
> in it to iterate through the user (role) folders getting the proper content.
> If I was doing a daily type of publishing environment then I could picture
> having a folder that writers would work out of for the next days article,
> and having a folder that is the current days content. I would then have a
> deadline and have a program that would move the current days content to an
> archived folder, move the working area content into the current days folder
> and leave the working area clean for the next days work.


If you create separate "portal types" for each kind of content, you
could then arrange to have different metadata policies for each one,
and therefore could get the tagging you want done "automagically".  The
deadline+expiration machinery you describe is distinct from the tagging,
of course.


> 
> Is this how the CMF designers picture their system being used (apart from
> how it used at the CMF site and other similar sites that have more of the
> garage sale interface --- that is, there may be a lot of interesting stuff
> but you are going to have to find it yourself). Is there any docs that the
> CMF designers have written that describe how a site could organize content
> generation. In general, how do people see how content gets integrated when
> using CMF so the web site provides a valuable user experience? Do you use
> smart queries along the line of the News/Events to organize the other types
> of content?


Exactly.  Getting the metadata populated correctly is crucial to
being able to build such "smart" queries.

Tres.
-- 
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Tres Seaver                                tseaver@zope.com
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