Using folders in Web Content Portlet

[Tarkan Corak, modificado hace 14 años.]

I'd like to see the ability to manage web content items in folders, similar to the usage of folders in Document Library Portlet and Image Gallery Portlet. This is a common feature from most of ECMS's, that helps authors to manage huge lists of content items. What do you think about it?

Tarkan

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hi Tarkan,

Do you think this would still be necessary if we provided a way to navigate through tags in the administration UI?

[Erik Andersson, modificado hace 14 años.]

Jorge,

This was my first thought as well when I saw this post. But then I realized that you would probably want to have different structures for the categorization in the admin interface and the pages/content for community members. You would use tags in the front end to help users navigate across related information. You would use tags in the admin interface to make your content mangagement more effective.

Perhaps one solution would simply be to use categories instead. You could create a Content Management Vocabulary (not the best name - but I hope you get what I mean).

Cheers,
Erik

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hi Erik,

Yeah, that can certainly work. The benefit is that it would allow using those same categories to filter web content listed through Asset Publisher.

The argument for folders would be to make it more consistent with other portlets such as doc lib or image gallery.

I'm still not sure what's best.

[Erik Andersson, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hi Jorge,

The more I think about it, the more I conclude that I would prefer categories over folders. The reason being that categories would allow for a richer structure. If a piece of web content could only appear on one page, then a hierarchical folder structure would be the best way to go. Since the same piece of web content can be used throughout many pages and contexts, I would argue that categorization would provide a more effective way to structure the content.

Cheers,
Erik

[Tarkan Corak, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hi there,

Thanks for your suggestions. So how would authors navigate through categories, when selecting a Web Content? The use case for selecting Web Content is: Place on empty portlet on page, click on "Add Web Content". And then browse through categories?

Authors using an ECMS with houndreds or even thousands of items like to arrange their content in something like a folder structure (could also be categories, but should be browsable/hierarchical like folders.)

Another aspect are permissions and content sharing. For documents and images you can define permissions at folder level. They will be passed to the items within this folder. I´m wondering if this behaviour would make permissions for Web Content easier or more complicated. One author could share all content in one folder by setting permissions once for this folder.

Regards
Tarkan

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hi Tarkan,

Categories are already hierarchical. To set up a hierarchy you just have to drag and drop one category into another, which will become the parent. (I know this UI should be more explicit)

Categories also supports permissions, but I think the behavior of folders would be more predictable for managing security due to the limitation that each content can only belong to one folder.

Jorge

[Miles Huang, modificado hace 14 años.]

Erik Andersson:

The more I think about it, the more I conclude that I would prefer categories over folders. The reason being that categories would allow for a richer structure. If a piece of web content could only appear on one page, then a hierarchical folder structure would be the best way to go. Since the same piece of web content can be used throughout many pages and contexts, I would argue that categorization would provide a more effective way to structure the content.

Hi Erik,
Just following you.
Since the web content may appear in various pages, the content managers may need a reversed direction query ability:
Given a web content, find out which pages are displaying it by which content display portlet, and possible listing on which pages by which content list/assert publish portlet.

Cheers,
Miles.

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hey guys,

I talked to a customer this week that had a very similar need. They were migrating from a "traditional" content management system that didn't have content decoupled from pages like Liferay does. While they like such decoupling for the flexibility it provides they wanted to be able to specify that certain users could only create content in a given section of the site.

To achieve this I'm thinking of adding a few new permission actions such as "Add Page" or "Manage Subpages". Also, for content, I was thinking that folders would match better their requirements because since each content can only belong to one folder makes it much easier to manage the permissions and know who can access certain content. Also it makes it much easier to specify "Users with role X can add new web content within this folder".

The good news is that this customer may be able to sponsor this development for 6.1 We'll know for sure in the following weeks.

While I'm tending towards folders in this case for the reasons stated above, I think that we should also implement some of the ideas related to categories. I particularly like the idea of linking a vocabulary to the sections of the site. In fact I've already implemented that before for some customers by creating a Wrapper/Listener of the Layout service/model, so it would be nice to be able to have that in the core.

[Oliver Bayer, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hi Jorge,

first of all I like the idea of being able to structure web content for better usability.
In the end this tends maybe towards the following suggestions from the Manage Pages Improvements - Wiki. You should be able to define which role is allowed to add, modify, delete web contents, pages, structures....

Oli

[Miles Huang, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hi,

I prefer to add folder support to Web Content assert, thus make it consistency with other type of asserts. While keep the category support to the web content assert, since the category is applied to all kinds of asserts.

Actually I don't think the folder and category are conflict concept with each other. Although they are similar in they can be both organized in a tree structure, but they have totally different concept except this.

I must admit a lot of my friends are confused with them, since the Image Gallery and Document Library have already has simulative category and folder support. And a story I usually used can make them have more clear concept:

Suggest you have a petty dog. Then your home is the "folder" of the dog. And the "animal/mammal/dog" may be one of the category applied to it, while "family member/pet/dog" may be another category applied to it simultaneously. And you may apply even more category to it if you have other new information retrieve requirements.

In the example, the "folder" have "belongs to" semantic, while category has "is a" semantic. Because the "home"(folder) owns the dog(assert), it is appropriate to define the permission for the assert by folder, thus allow distributed maintenance of the "dogs"(asserts) by "home"(folder) owner. While it doesn't make sense to identify these concept on the category. The category may be much appropriate for flexible information retrieve/filter functionality, just as assert publisher portlet do.

Regards,
Miles.

[Miles Huang, modificado hace 14 años.]

Hi,

Just a complement of the last post.

May be the idea implied in distributed management of asserts in folders implied a "Folder Role" concept. We have already "Community Roles", "Organization Roles" in liferay.

Since I'm relative new to Liferay and doesn't know much about the underlined permission system implementation, I don't know if with the Folder Roles, the Community Roles and Organization Roles can be unified into 2 special case of Folder Roles. But these concept have common sense.

Regards,
Miles.

[Kevin Niekamp, modificado hace 12 años.]

Jorge,

We are looking for a similar feature. Was wondering if this is going to be incorporated in the 6.1 release?

Thanks,
Kevin

[Jorge Ferrer, modificado hace 12 años.]

Hi Kevin,

I'm afraid it didn't make it on time for 6.1, but it will most probably be included in 6.2 which is expected to be released during 2012.

[Juan Fernández, modificado hace 11 años.]

Good news, guys!
Your feature was implemented for Liferay 6.2 - more info here (LPS-25764)
Regards
Juan

[Miles Huang, modificado hace 14 años.]

Erik Andersson:

Perhaps one solution would simply be to use categories instead. You could create a Content Management Vocabulary (not the best name - but I hope you get what I mean).

If the Vocabulary can be sync with the page structure and the web content referenced by a web content display portlet can be automatically assigned a category in the vocabulary and sync with the page structure change.