Lenya 2, resource type or custom metadata?

[ma...@schrick-design.de]

Dear Mailing List,

I'd like to ask for some hints/ideas/best practise on content-structuring.

On almost any page in the publication(s) we need/use some 'page-related' content like teasers, download-links, links to external resources (not in the publication) and other information what is not really a part of the page-(main)content as for example a link or image inside the article. For this related content we need the option to use xhtml elements for formatting/structuring, so text-only is no option.
At the moment (in Lenya 1.2.4) we use DIVs with special IDs within the pagebody of our XHTML-document type. This requires to 'extract' these data from the main-content on pagerendering. For editing we've to use a customised TinyMCE-based edit view with multiple instances of Tiny on the page.
Although this works fine I'm looking for a 'cleaner' way to structure/separate the related content from the main content.

My idea is to use a custom set of Metadata. Is this possible or even worst practise?
As far as I understood custom Metadata in Lenya(2) it would fit perfectly for this if it's possible/allowed to use xhtml-formatted content in the  <value /> elements.
The benefits I see instead of the use of new resource types is, that it's:
- useable for any (existing) document
- no need to create many new resourcetypes to add these fields
- independent (from the document content) editable/versionized

Many thanks ahead for your help!

Best Regards,
 Gerd


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Re: Lenya 2, resource type or custom metadata?

[Andreas Hartmann <an...@apache.org>]

Hi Gerd,

mail@schrick-design.de schrieb:

[…]

> On almost any page in the publication(s) we need/use some
> 'page-related' content like teasers, download-links, links to
> external resources (not in the publication) and other information
> what is not really a part of the page-(main)content as for example a
> link or image inside the article. For this related content we need
> the option to use xhtml elements for formatting/structuring, so
> text-only is no option. At the moment (in Lenya 1.2.4) we use DIVs
> with special IDs within the pagebody of our XHTML-document type. This
> requires to 'extract' these data from the main-content on
> pagerendering. For editing we've to use a customised TinyMCE-based
> edit view with multiple instances of Tiny on the page. Although this
> works fine I'm looking for a 'cleaner' way to structure/separate the
> related content from the main content.
> 
> My idea is to use a custom set of Metadata. Is this possible or even
> worst practise?

IMO this would somehow contradict the meaning of meta data - IIUC you 
want to managa data here, not data about data. Another disadvantage is 
that there is no out-of-the-box validation for meta data values.

> As far as I understood custom Metadata in Lenya(2) it
> would fit perfectly for this if it's possible/allowed to use
> xhtml-formatted content in the  <value /> elements.

The meta data are just strings, so you could probably store XML. I've 
never tried it, maybe someone else did?

> The benefits I
> see instead of the use of new resource types is, that it's:

> - useable for any (existing) document

This could also be achieved by including a separate document, couldn't it?

 > - no need to create many new resourcetypes to add these fields

Maybe a single resource type (with a flexible schema) would be sufficient?

 > - independent (from the document content) editable/versionized

I don't quite understand this - the meta data are versioned together 
with the document, but if you'd use separate documents for your related 
content, you could edit them separately and they would have their own 
version history.

I'd probably use an additional resource type (e.g., "relatedContent"), 
and store the content in dedicated documents. To make the GUI easier, 
you could add an "Edit related content" item to the menubar of "normal" 
pages (if there is a 1-to-{0,1} relation between normal pages and 
related content).

-- Andreas


-- 
Andreas Hartmann, CTO
BeCompany GmbH
http://www.becompany.ch
Tel.: +41 (0) 43 818 57 01


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