[silva-dev] plans for reference management

[Clemens Klein-Robbenhaar]

Hi Roman, Martijn,

Roman Joost wrote:
[...]
 >> I thought about porting the CMFLinkChecker[1] to Silva. The linkchecking
 >> part is factored out of the CMF product, so that implementing a Silva
 >> pendant wouldn't be a difficult task. I've to admit, that I haven't
 >> elaborated which problems we might face, so I expect the port of the
 >> product seems to be easy.

  So far I did not find the time to look into CMFLinkChecker; last time I did
I had to admit I simply did not understand the code, and hence rolled my own.

  In the result the external link checker f the SilvaReferenceChecker
is really poor, to say it modestly. If it is possible to replace it
with the "lms" the CMFLinkChecker uses, this would certainly an improvment.

  Looking at the feature list of the CMFLinkChecker I am quite impressed and
not certain, if it does make sense to develop the current "SilvaReferenceChecker"
any further, if a port of the CMFLinkChecker is a feaseable alternative.
  I admit I do not really understand what Roman is planning to do here.

[...]
>> In order to avoid concurrent development on same features, I'd like to
>> discuss this topic on the mailinglist first. So, what are your plans for
>> the future of reference management?

  Well, my plans are to try to get rid of the current, single point
reference checking and more to get into the direction of reference management.
  The first step would be to maintain all references in Silva content objects,
instead of fetching them globally in each reference check.
  Because updating the references each time someone edits a document seems
a bit overkill to me I feel the step of approving a document (or some other
versioned content) seems to be the right time to fetch the references
contained in the approved version.
  This seems to require to add a hook to the versioning / workflow machinery,
however.
  I am not sure what to do with non-versioned content, especially containers.

  After that step one could think of more features like updating references
if e.g. an asset gets renamed, etc. I did not really get that far ;)

  As far as I understand Romans intention he wants to go into a different
direction, e.g. improving the ability to check external links.

  Roman: If we want to coordinate our work on improving the current
SilvaReferenceChecker checker, how do we do that? I do not have the resources
to set up a public CVS server or the like. I thought about an archive at
SorceForge maybe, but the last time I asked on this mailinglist if
other developers of Silva add-ons would be interested in having some
"Silva common add-ons" repository there I got no response thus I did not
tried that so far.

  My current resources are about 4-8 hours per week; subtracting
the time to read and answer my mail there is not much left. So I do
expect to progress only slowly, most probaly getting the feature
of the "reference catalog" implemented in the end of the summer.

  If You plan to proceed faster, especially if You think to overhaul
the complete product anyway, please be so kind to let me know;
I do not want to maintain a product which is rendered obsolete in
the near future antway.

Martijn Faassen replied:
[...]
> We'll be happy to support you in your effort and discuss issues on the 
> list. If you want to check in code, do please use a branch for this. Try 
> to keep the impact on Silva core code as minimal as possible.
> 

I am not certain what Roman's plans are, but so far I would like
to keep the reference checking stuff into its own product. On some places
especially in the UI integration I had hit some limits of that aproach, but
nevertheless I would like not to touch Silva itself for now.
  Maybe I will come up with some wish on the list later like "please
make it possible to add a button here in the SMI" which we can discuss
then ...

> One form of integration you may want to consider using is to use Five.
> We've recently used this to good success with a new Silva layout 
> integration, for instance. 
[...]

  I have not thought about that option. I admit I did not even look into Five
so far :-/
  My current unreleased development version uses some "adapter" aproach to get
the references out of some content object (unlike the monkey patches the released
version does), but that is all.

  So I guess I should take a look at Five now, better late than never ;-)


Cheers,
Clemens