> I can imagine a few situations where links might be
> useful. Say for example I want to choose certain
> articles to appear on the "front page" of a newspaper,
> but they still have to appear in their own sections
> correctly. I can create a "true" topic tree that
> holds the content according to to whatever system I'm
> using to organize it:
>
> \_ sports
> \_ finance
> \_ people
>
> but link certain articles into another tree for
> special pages, like the front page:
>
> \_ front page
> \_ top stories
> \_ local news
That's a pretty typical example of the kind of
cross-referencing that IMHO Midgard should be built to
support easily.
> To support this:
>
> 1. it should be obvious by looking at the object that
> it's a link
Obvious from the administrative interface, I assume
you mean.
> 2. deleting the original article should give me some
> sort of warning if there are links to it
>
> 3. what should happen to the link if I do decide to
> delete the "true" copy? There should at least be
> an option to delete all links to it.
Yes, there are lots of record integrity and permissions
issues that we'll need to consider.
> You raise the question of "overriding" certain
> properties like the score. That could be useful
> and should be technically easy, but think about
> a) is it really needed?
Well, that's the question. My take on this is that it's
necessary to be able to alter anything to do with the
display behaviour of a linked article. The score of
an article is really a display parameter, unrelated to
article content. Someone acting in the role of a display
editor would need to be able to set this to make use of
the built-in Midgard sort_by utilities. So the
implementation issue is: do you let the score of the
linked article be set by the editor/linker to be different
from the source? That seems like a pretty straightforward
approach. But another possibility (borrowing loosely
from XLinks) is to allow more information about relationships
among elements to be expressed in the link.
For example, let's say you have an article record
and a list of person records. The article has a
principal author and a number of contributors. It
would be neat to be able to make one link between
the article and the principal author and designate
it to be the 'principal author link' and other
'contributor' links to other person records.
The records could then be sorted and displayed using
this information.
This approach seems pretty powerful, but obviously
more complex. Is it worth it?
Paul
http://www.commentext.org
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