I'm working on a cms system and time has come to do the metadata stuff. I don't have much experience in this aspect of the cms so I'd like to hear your thoughts about what essential features one should include, anyone has any good experience to share on the subject?
I've also figured out two ways I could implement metadata, either to simply store xmldata for each document which then can be aggregated into one big document which you can run powerful xpath expressions against. The other method is using a dynamical database implemented in sql where you can define different attributes for each document. The problem with the first approach is that the aggregated xmldocuments are potentially huge and loading it into memory for searching would probably mean a performance hit. Method nr 2 should work pretty well , should even be able to convert the sql tables to xml if you want to do xpath or to direct sql searches, only downside I can see is that the metadata probably can't be as hierachial complex keeping the xml shallow. On the other hand I'm not sure metadata needs to be that structurally complex, any thoughts? best regards --- Mattias Konradsson -- http://cms-list.org/ more signal, less noise.
