Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Parent_id for folders with no parent in acs-content-repository

Lars,

I guess there are two ways to do this:

1) Define a root site_node folder, similar to file-storage and create child folders underneath it.

2) Create a site-node for each content folder.

I am thinking the second option would be best. It would allow easier URL calculation, as the URL of the site-node is stored in memory so you would only need to add the items name to the site node url to build a URL.

This also supports the one "thing" per package_id (or node_id) idea that seems to be preferred by some OpenACS developers.

So if we apply idea #2 to file-storage, each file-storage folder would be a seperate instance of file-storage. This creates an additional package instance object, but simplifies URL calculation.

Going even further, if the parent site_node/folder was stored in acs_objects instead of package_id, determining a URL would be quick and painless for objects that have a URL.

There are many options. I think definitely integrating site pages in with the rest of the objects is a good idea and makes OpenACS a better platform for content, learning, knowledge, etc management applications.

I was thinking more along the lines of having a single site-map-and-content-folder hierarchy, instead of maintaining two hierarchies alongside each other.

Something like simply hanging CR items off of site-nodes instead of CR folders, and getting rid of CR folders altogether.

This leaves open the problem of packages that are mounted in several different places. The way I think we should solve this problem, generally, is that a package always has a single canonical home in the site map, and all other occurrances are symlinks to some other node.

Thoughts?

/Lars