On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Emiliano wrote:

> Adam Blomberg wrote:

> > My problem is this: The major parts of the site will be administrated
> > by a group of administrators, but then several departments will
> > administrate their own pages (or subsites). For them (and for us),
> > the content management part would be great, if you conveniently could
> > map topics to pages, so that you can browse the topic structure
> > without having to make an active page which handles all
> > requests. (Btw, in the current stable version, this doesn't seem
> > to be possible.)
> 
> That would be how we usually handle it. It's possible with the current
> stable version although you'd have to write the 'by name' access
> functions
> in PHP. These have been added as native midgard functions in the 1.4
> releases.
> 
> You can attach data to pages in the 1.4 releases (attachments,
> parameters)
> although these will still need help from active pages to get served out.
> 
> In what way does the active page approach not service your needs?

Well, it would work, but I believe that this is a rather common
situation (where some kind of mapping topics<->articles is
used), so built-in support support for it might be good. (And
probably faster than the PHP approach.)

> > I would like it to work something like this: When you create a new
> > topic (named "support" for example), a "virtual" page is also set up,
> > based on a template (or parent) page of the current topic tree. All
> > articles added to this topic would then be accesible by very
> > simple means; as we know which topic we are in right know, one can
> > simply fetch all articles which have the current topic as parent.
> 
> But you'd need to have a standardized approach to formatting these
> articles. I can't concieve of having a fixed formatting engine in
> midgard.

I thought of having a "parent" page, that contains all PHP code/HTML
code/other formatting needed to present the material. In essence,
this would be similar to an active page, but without having to do the
lookup for the article to show.

> > Another approach could be that each page created in the "page
> > admin" results in a topic, that can then be filled with articles (and
> > possibly other topics as well, depending on the user privileges).
> > The page would then "know" which topic id that corresponds to the
> > current page, so that you won't have to hard-code topics to pages
> > (this is what I'm doing right know, slightly annoying :)
> 
> I understand this problem. Access-by-name plus an active page has
> been the approach I've taken so far.

As I mentioned above, I think that this is a central function of any
content management system, and the fact that you (and others) have
used the dynamic page approach may imply that a native function for
would be useful.  

> > Are there any functions that would support this proposed behavior in
> > the upcoming versions, and if not, is there a better way to solve the
> > problem of connecting content "folders" to actual pages?
> 
> If there are, I'm interested. The main problem would be how to do the
> transformation from raw content to HTML sent to the browser.

If you could use a pages as formatting templates rather than as
"site handlers, I think you have solved that problem :)

// Adam


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