Hi Lenya devs,
during the development of the docu publication, I got the feeling that
it would be very convenient to have a set of meta data which allows to
configure the presentation of a document in the site structure. A
transformer would take care of rendering the navigation widgets accordingly.
A big advantage of this approach would be that we can add important
functionality without extending the site management API. On the other
hand, it would contradict the separation of site structure and
documents. But at the moment virtually all functionality (info area,
workflow, ...) is designed to work with documents and not with sitetree
nodes. IMO it makes more sense to (ab)use documents than extend the
sitetree functionality, at least in 2.0.x. We could try to improve the
situation in the next major version.
The following elements could be useful:
folderNode = true|false
----------
This element is used to specify that a document represents a folder
node. If the user clicks on the menu link, the document isn't requested
but the subtree is expanded using javascript (like it is already the
case in the docu publication).
My first approach to implement this behaviour was to create sitetree
nodes which are not connected to documents at all. But this has several
disadvantages:
- The API would have to be changed.
- The info area doesn't work for these nodes.
- The workflow doesn't work for these nodes, you can't publish them.
Now I have introduced a "foldernode" module with a meta data element set
and a transformer which removes the href attributes from navigation
nodes if foldernode=true, so that the javascript call is inserted by
menu.xsl. But IMO this functionality is generic enough to move it to the
sitetree module.
externalLink = <uri>
============
This element is used to specify that a sitetree node points to an
external URI. In 1.2, this was achieved using the href attributes of
sitetree nodes. IMO it would be much easier to store the link in the
meta data.
----
A major concern about this approach is performance. When transforming
the sitetree, the validity of the meta data of all involved documents
has to be verified. I'm not sure yet how big the performance impact
would be.
Apart from this concern - WDYT about this approach?
TIA for any comments!
-- Andreas
--
Andreas Hartmann, CTO
BeCompany GmbH
http://www.becompany.ch
Tel.: +41 (0) 43 818 57 01
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