Forum OpenACS CMS: Feature List

I worked on a bullet point user feature list last night, based on the CR functionality.

It's pretty rough ansd has a few blanks, but can I suggest we discuss it in this forum thread as a precusor to editing the list?

link here

As per the description of this page:

First draft of the required user features of the new CMS. When finished and agreed on, this list can be used to build a click-through mockup, and design the tcl apis required by the ui.

The inserting inline is pretty easy - like you say we just make up a new tag - what is tricky (or will require thinking due to the infinate ways it could be handled) is how these parts will be handled in the ui.

You are right that inso is Oracle specific - we can use vwWare: http://wvware.sourceforge.net/ for word documents and pdftohtml: http://pdftohtml.sourceforge.net/ for pdfs. I am sure we can find other tools for excel etc.

Mark, please run Tidy http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/ on your word doc and replace the code in the features list, I can't edit it or comment the way it is :)

To support convertion/cleanup, we should not restrict to one way, ie: inso filters, but support a service contract that can take input in one format, and produce output in another. This way you could use an external utility, and the CMS would not be aware of the implementation.

For file upload, the CMS can easily allow parameters for items such as, uploaded file storage, filesystem or database, the CR provides a way to access the content without worrying about where it is.

If we accept utpload of complete HTML docs, at least we sohuld extract the HTML title to use as the content revision title. There are also meta tags for author etc, that could be extracted if they exist.

The decision if revisions should go live immediatlye should not be made for hte user. It can be a package wide parameter, or like lars-blogger, ask the content editor, with the default set by the parameter. It is easy enough to offer this level of flexibility.

Do we have any real analysis that storing edits in the cr_revisions table will not scale? Has anyone tested this?

FOr folders, I think per-subsite is the best way to manage it. That is, each subsite has a cms root folder.

More later.

David,

I don't see any reason your application wouldn't "just work" with the CMS plans we have.

Basically each homepage would be a folder. The user who owns the homepage would be given write permission on the folder and could add content items and folders inside that folder.

We could add some prebuilt styles and templates.

Any package I work on will be subsite-enabled, so that each subsite can have a distinct instance of that package.

There's no evidence that revisions per se don't scale, this is continously asserted without data to support the assertion.

In a traditional CMS, which is article-oriented, revisions are relatively few and editors and authors will want an audit trail (remember the requirement for an audit trail drove the decision to provide revisions, this decision wasn't made by aD in a vacuum)

ETP is used more as a page builder rather than a scheduled article builder and it seems obvious that over time lots of revisions might build up.

Hey Jun and Mark,

it would be great to integrate openoffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) as a converter for documents. It can convert alomst anything to everything and the conversion filters are being constantly improved as you can see on their mailing lists...

A subsite aware CMS is what I want to see as well David. This way each little publishing community can take advantage of OpenACS packages (ticket tracker, time logger, publication forum, etc.) as they prepare and revise content for publication. An option that allows a user to render content to the file system would be nice too. That way we have reliability (pages get served even if the DB connection goes on vacation), scalability (AOLServer can do what it is good at), portability (there is always a hard copy of content that can be moved to whatever platform is in style) and we can use stuff like the static pages package.