Here's a new post to that thread. (I'm cross-posting it
because not everybody is monitoring the testing board, and
because the thread is relevant to Design as well).
I just had an opportunity to learn a bit about a product called
LiveLink, put out by OpenText. It has some
interesting functionality which is relevant to the use of the site
map.
Livelink strictly adheres to a folders system (which means
they strictly adhere to a tree hierarchy). Users start by organizing
their content into a strict tree, in somewhat the same way the
sitemap works. They can then create alternative trees using
categories. If I understand correctly, category trees are simply
alternative folder systems that may contain content or aliases for
that content (similar to, say, mounting the same bboard instance
in more than one subsite.)
Once the various trees/categories are set up, users may
assign attributes (i.e., keywords) to the nodes. Attributes may be
either mandatory or optional for items placed within a node. In
addition to helping with search, this also enables the system to
do some auto-categorization (I think).
Interestingly, the moment items are placed into folders, a
web page is auto-generated for each node, showing links to all
items underneath it. Different icons represent different types of
items (folders, web pages, documents, etc.) The display logic for
the pages is templated.
What's nice about this approach is that it creates a logical,
easy-to-understand workflow for non-technical people to create
websites (or subsites):
- Set up primary folder structure
- Drop content into folders
- Set up alternative trees and assign attributes
- Choose the templates for displaying the node pages
This short set of simple, easy-to-understand actions lets a
non-programmer set up an arbitrarily large web site with
arbitrarily deep navigation, an arbitrary number of alternative
organization schemes (i.e., category trees), and support for
richer searching and auto-categorization.
I'd love to see OpenACS adopt a scheme like this one.
