[opencms-dev] openCMS 6 beta 2 - Categorization of Structured Content

[bart vandendriessche]

After just finishing a project in openCMS 5.0.1 and now exploring 
openCMS 6 beta 2, I am very pleasantly surprised to find the 
implementation of Structured Content through the use of XML Schema. I 
implemented something similar for our customer in openCMS 5.0.1 and one 
of the issues that really hasn't been properly dealt with, and still is 
present in openCMS 6 is the issue of categorization. This is a problem 
inherent to storing objects in a single file as opposed to a database 
because in doing so, we lose alot of the relationships a relational 
database has to offer. To give an example:
Imagine the Article StructuredContent type thats included in the 
templateone demo needs to be placed in a certain category, let's say we 
have 2 categories, hardware and software. Sure we could modify the XML 
Schema to include a choice element that gives us the ability to choose 
between these two categories, but what happens when the name of one of 
these categories changes, a category is added or  a category is removed 
? We would have to change our XML Schema to reflect the changes, which 
could possibly break all the StructuredContent that was previously 
validated by this XSD.
A better solution in my opinion would be to define categories themselves 
by a XSD (one XSD per type of category, ie: articlecategory.xsd and 
newscategory.xsd), and then create a kind of widget that would show up a 
list of these categories while editing the original StructuredContent.
These are just initial thoughts on the subject, please discuss :)