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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