Forums / Cotonti / Core Labs / Ideas / Hierarchical Data Format(s)

Like Drupal's books, ocportal's CEDI

nicafyl
#1 2012-06-02 17:27

Drupal offers what they call books. It is a set of pages grouped together in a hierarchical relationship. An example of this can be found at http://www.nicaliving.com/node/5 which is one of a few books on the site. There is nothing particularly special about the "pages" other than their relationship in a tree. For example, each page has its own comments.

A similar capability but a bit more free-form is CEDI in ocportal. It could best be described as more like a Wiki but with a tree structure as well. If you have ever used Zim (http://zim-wiki.org) you probably grok this right away. The web site itself was actually created using Zim by building the tree in Zim and then exporting the pages in HTML.

El Gringo de Linux en Nicaragua
Trustmaster
#2 2012-06-02 17:49

I was going to start this message with how different the Cotonti's "categories + pages" approach is to Drupal's "nodes". But then I suddenly realized that you can add a text extra field to the structure table in Cotonti and turn the category tree into the nodes tree. Comments and ratings are (theoretically) supported for categories too (but currently they are buggy there).

May the Source be with you!
nicafyl
#3 2012-06-02 20:47

Interesting. It's pretty clear I need to stop talking and do some serious playing. It sounds like this would make Cotonti a viable tool for I site I have on my project list. NicaLiving also requires individual blogs and a photo gallery so it is clearly not a fit at this time (nor did I expect it to be).

And, a bit later ...

I tried to figure out how to implement your suggestion. Adding the field is easy but I then realized it would need to be in the template, ... So, time for less talking and more research.

El Gringo de Linux en Nicaragua
This post was edited by nicafyl (2012-06-03 00:38, 11 years ago)
GHengeveld
#4 2012-06-02 21:57
Depending on the exact features you need, Cotonti can be used for individual blogs and photo galleries using some plugins. There are several photo galleries out there and individual blogs is just a matter of writing a plugin which grants admin rights to a user in a specific category.
nicafyl
#5 2012-06-03 00:13

That was my assumption (and why I said "at this time". While I am not ready today to try to make these things happen, it really doesn't seem that hard.

Thinking about this reminds me of the GOD (Good Old Days) of Usenet, back when you would find posts by DMR and everyone knew that was Dennis Ritchie. A common competition was to find the lightest tool to do a job. It might start with someone's C program to do something. You would then have someone show how to do it with awk, then sed, ... It was fun to play the game but, also, you learned a lot about the capabilities of those tools.

Learning to do "fancy things" with Cotonti could be equally enlightening.

El Gringo de Linux en Nicaragua
GHengeveld
#6 2012-06-03 09:35
One of the nice things about Cotonti is that you can achieve a certain result in various ways. Discovering new ways is part of the way up enlightenment.