What's the best method of incorporating external documents?
My Forrest project is becoming a victim of its own success; our beta release contains 2,200 pages of XML content that's extracted from a repository. However, now I have to link my Forrest pages to supporting documents that are outside of my control, but are pointed to by the repository. To further compound my problems, the links must be relative to Forrest because the site will be deployed on multiple servers and must also be executable from a standalone DVD.
Sounds similar to my own problems.
I've reviewed the support archives for similar problems and from what I can tell I might have three choices: IMSManifest, ForrestBot, and the new Link mapping. Can someone shed light on the pros/cons of each approach or on something that I haven’t considered?
The bad news is that none of these solutions are mature enough to achieve what you want to achieve. Let me run through them:
IMSManifest ===========
This allows you to include whole subsites from remote repositories rather than individual documents. It is planned that we will make this much more flexible, but it is not a top priority for us right now.
It is also intended that this mounting of subsites will be moved into core so that it works with the standard site.xml. But again, we are not sure when this will happen as no devs need it right now.
Even when this is implemented though it will require that the remote files be part of another IMS packaged content package (or Forrest site if it makes it into core). It's not clear from your description if this will be the case.
ForrestBot ==========
I've no idea how this could be applied to this use case or even if it can. I'll have to let someone else comment here.
LinkMapping ===========
This *should* be the solution for you if I understand the linkmap correctly. I intend to link this functionality with the IMSManifest to provide a best of both worlds solution. But again time is the enemy. I have started work on this locally, but have not actually got the linkmap working yet (although I understand that it is *supposed* to work).
I'm afraid the only way you will achieve this is to join us over on the dev list and help us implement a solution. As I said, I have similar problems and will be more than happy to advise you on where the code is. I am sure the other devs will too as the Linkmap is scheduled for inclusion.
Ross
