[opencms-dev] How to move content properly

[Peter Birchmeier]

Hi

to be honest, I also wonder about the content addressing mechanism used 
by OpenCms. In my opinion, it is one of the main tasks of a CMS to take 
over the automated linking between content objects.
I think there exist two ways to go:

1. Content objects (xml content, jsp/html pages, ..) are further 
addressed by its VFS file name. Whenever an object shall be 
renamed/moved, all other objects linking to the previous should be 
adapted. A good solution would be to store additional infos for each 
content object, infos containing a list of all objects linking to the 
specific one. Thus instead of starting a complete search over a wide 
range of objects to find all linking objects, only the objects in the 
list have to updated.

2. More complicated but more effective: content objects are only 
addressed by its id.
Disadvantage: Building and maintaining JSP files manually is nasty since 
links (includes, ..) contain ids instead of comprehensible file names of 
objects.
Advantage: objects can be renamed, moved, whatever you like to do with 
it. If there is enough support in automating the process of linking 
(e.g. inserting a link: OpenCms asks to chose a file (= object) and 
inserts its id), it is the way to go.

kind regards, Peter