Forum OpenACS CMS: Re: Some basic reflections on what a CMS has to do

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Posted by Jun Yamog on
Hi Dani,

Relating content with assests are already part of BCMS since its part of CR.  The UI in the demo site on admin does already show this.  Unfortunately the template that I made does not show this functionality.  But its really there.  Basically I just used the existing CR relations feature.  So any item in CR can be related to any other item.

There are 2 problems in linking items with one another that I have encountered in workin on the CMS space.  OpenACS and CCM.

1. Putting the link within a content's body.  Its very easy to have the template pull the related images and put it beside the article (which is already implemented in BCMS).  What is hard is putting the link inline.  Its like a href but an internal one within CMS.  It must be internal to eliminate broken links (404).  I have done something similar in my CCM project, linking by an internal id.  Doubly hard is migrating existing content and generating the links to the new system, but then again that is another story.  I am thinking something in the lines of a href="cms://123" wherein 123 is the internal item id.

2. Using a unique id such as the object id, but it would be nice if the id is not part of OpenACS so migration to another CMS will be easier.  Although I think the debate about using id other than object id is still going on.

It is also great that you have pointed out that searching through the library of existing content to link them with new content is very important.  Not exactly sure what is the best approach in terms of UI.  We also have a terrible search engine in terms of telling that you just want a particular subset to be searched.  Say I want to link an image, so we should only search the meta data of images.  I don't think in openfts this is easy to do.  It will search the whole system not just the images library.