[Zope-CMF] Topics / Folders / URL Design

[sean.upton@uniontrib.com]

I was thinking about URL design issues this morning, and was wondering: has
done anything like, or considered the possibility of extending the CMFTopic
machinery to make Topics behave like Virtual Folders?

>From a URL design perspective, it seems a bit strange to make users go to
one URL path for Section Fronts (powered by Topics and topic_view skin
method(s)) and then have URLs for linked content items use the physical
containment path for access.

If the point of Topics is to try and escape bounding the arrangement of
content in terms of its physical containment, why not extend it to provide a
proxy for traversal to an item as well?

For example:

http://foo.bar.com/sports/basketball/
is the section front for a news site, powered by topic/subtopic...

...it has a link to:
http://foo.bar.com/News/Nov02/1234567.html
...where News/Nov02 is its containment path.

I would like the ability to have:
http://foo.bar.com/sports/basketball/1234567.html 
act as a proxy to the above content item; in certain skins, I would
construct links in skin methods to point to this logical URL, because it
makes more sense to a class of end-users of the web-site viewing the content
from a purely logical, not physical, perspective.

My thought is this: "When serving content: Where containment matters, use
it.  Where containment confuses, don't."  Since object traversal is
something malleable in Zope, this seems to make some level of sense, no?

Comments, thoughts, suggestions?

Sean

+-----------------------------------------------------------
| Sean Upton
|  Site Technology Supervisor             SignOnSanDiego.com
|  Development & Integration     The San Diego Union-Tribune
|  619.718.5241                     sean.upton@uniontrib.com
|        PATH_TO_THE_DARK_SIDE = 'c:\winnt\system32'
+-----------------------------------------------------------