Cornucopt Dev Log

You won’t understand this, but you’ll be enlightened when you’re done

February 3rd, 2005

Found this paper on something Drupal is preparing or possibly not preparing, called the Content Construction Kit. I don’t know enough about the technical underpinnings of Drupal to be able to say exactly what’s going on here, for example, but even just the beginning of the next page tells me that there is some useful thinking there for how to extend Cornucopt’s content model out to the next level.

See, it turns out to actually be pretty hard to deal with things like search. So far, searching CoCo has been limited to title searches, but once you do full text search, how do you give users and/or admins a manageable way to say what it’s appropriate to search and what isn’t? Another way of looking at search is from the perspective of application-wiki problems. How do you tell your in-page widget to do something to a given set of pages? And truthfully, even title search is complex - I’ve already special-cased Corny’s database to keep track of what’s a comment so that they don’t appear in title searches. It’s not as if I should have to tell the changes table what every pagetype is, and write special SQL code for them all. And search isn’t the only such problem - RSS feeds are starting to look similarly tough.

So I’m hoping something in this document is gonna save my ass. The hope is that I will end up with an easy way for admins and/or users to define new pagetypes without writing PHP, and in some way consistent with permissions and generally not naughty.

Entry Filed under: General, Vision, Implementation