> Paul Newby wrote:
> > Really what you have in the articles is two types of
> > information: > 'content,' with components that are closely
> > bound and are relatively isolated from anything external;
> > and then apart from content some kind of 'package', consisting
> > of components that are configured to arrange and express the article
> > content in the environment in which it's referenced.
> >
> > This suggests that article_content might be disconnected
> > from topics altogether, and then joined with (at least one)
> > article_package, of which there may be many versions
> > registered under different topics, but all referencing the
> > same article_content.
>
> This could work, and would in fact be a very clean approach. It
> does however bring a few challenges:
>
> * Where does ACL checking cascade to when no explicit ACL is set on
> the article? The current setup would enable a site maintainer to
> grant ownership of a topic tree to a group of persons who could
> then take full control over the tree. When the article contents
> is no longer explicitly part of a specific topic tree you cannot
> maintain this approach. It would also effectively make the article
> space flat, which is going to make maintenance harder.
> * What to do with orphaned articles? You can't unlink them after
> the last link is gone, since some other editor might want it, and
> besides, ownership of the links will have no relationship to
> ownership of the content.
Have to agree that the idea of a huge unstructured mass
of content is pretty unpalatable; as suggested, the idea
was that an article must have at least one 'package' to link
it to at least one topic... but then there's implicity a single
source topic identified, so what's the point?
Well, I think the main point is that this thread has fingered
a distinct major area of responsibility between 'style' and
'content' that belongs to site editors. Editors generally
need to have enough resources and authority to allow
them to reference articles that may have been written in
one context but are to be used in another. So this
group may take ownership of a topic tree (which may be
empty of article content), and need permission
to pull article content into a (possibly separate) topic
tree. But editors generally won't need to have authority
to modify the content of the referenced articles; they
really only need to control article display behaviour
in the context in which they have been given responsibility.
Maybe looking at the problem from the coal-face of
the code it's obvious some kind of supercharged symbolic
link is the way to go... however it's done it seems the
editorial function is pretty important, on par with style
or content management, and it would be a big advantage
if the tools available for editorial management are
clearly deliniated and differentiated from style or
content management.
Paul
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