Check out this fabulous tip on Kyle's blog - provided by my old Stellent mentor and all-round nice guy Ed Bryant.
I'm gonna go replace my UCM search pages right now...
Friday 22 January 2010
Monday 4 January 2010
Contribution Folders: Same Same But Different
There seems to be a lot of people who misunderstand the Contribution Folders feature of UCM. Crikey, half the features seem to be misunderstood. Things like UCM security Accounts being mistaken for Microsoft Active Directory accounts, or SiteStudio website Sections being confused with directories in a website. Like a popular t-shirt in Cambodia says, they are "Same Same But Different."
Contribution Folders may look like regular directories or folders on your desktop but they are definitely not the same thing and definitely should not be used the same way. So what is a Contribution Folder anyway? Glad you asked.
A Contribution Folder is a fancy name for a webDAV access point. It allows you to drag-n-drop files from your machine right into the Content Server. How cool is that? However, the Content Server is not a filesystem like your computer, it's a content management system organised by metadata. The Contribution Folders are just virtual folders - they don't physically exist; there are no corresponding directories in the filesystem. A Contribution Folder is just a metadata value attached to a content item.
Think of them more like the "labels" feature in Gmail. A bunch of emails with the same label can all be displayed together or modified together, regardless of where they are located in your mailbox. Contribution Folders work in a similar way. There is a slight difference though; you can't have more than one folder assigned to an item. This makes folders unsuitable for organising your content, so only use folders for the easy drag-n-drop experience.
Now here's the tricky part. Content management requires all content to have metadata assigned. So it's easy to drag-n-drop your files into the system, but what metadata will it get? What security group is applied? This is where the Contribution Folder takes over. The folder itself can be preset with metadata that gets automatically applied to all files dragged inside it. So if you drop 15 images into the folder, all 15 get the same security group applied. Pretty neat, eh? No more pesky checkin forms. But what happens when you need to apply a different security group? Well, just create a different folder and drag into it. But now things start to get tricky. Which folder do you drag into? What happens if you use the wrong one? How deep do your folders go? Who is assigning the correct metadata to the folders? How much does a Cambodian t-shirt cost anyway? Folder management is tricky for the sysadmin and easily abused by contributors, so keep their use to a minimum.
Here's a few pointers about using folders:
Contribution Folders may look like regular directories or folders on your desktop but they are definitely not the same thing and definitely should not be used the same way. So what is a Contribution Folder anyway? Glad you asked.
A Contribution Folder is a fancy name for a webDAV access point. It allows you to drag-n-drop files from your machine right into the Content Server. How cool is that? However, the Content Server is not a filesystem like your computer, it's a content management system organised by metadata. The Contribution Folders are just virtual folders - they don't physically exist; there are no corresponding directories in the filesystem. A Contribution Folder is just a metadata value attached to a content item.
Think of them more like the "labels" feature in Gmail. A bunch of emails with the same label can all be displayed together or modified together, regardless of where they are located in your mailbox. Contribution Folders work in a similar way. There is a slight difference though; you can't have more than one folder assigned to an item. This makes folders unsuitable for organising your content, so only use folders for the easy drag-n-drop experience.
Now here's the tricky part. Content management requires all content to have metadata assigned. So it's easy to drag-n-drop your files into the system, but what metadata will it get? What security group is applied? This is where the Contribution Folder takes over. The folder itself can be preset with metadata that gets automatically applied to all files dragged inside it. So if you drop 15 images into the folder, all 15 get the same security group applied. Pretty neat, eh? No more pesky checkin forms. But what happens when you need to apply a different security group? Well, just create a different folder and drag into it. But now things start to get tricky. Which folder do you drag into? What happens if you use the wrong one? How deep do your folders go? Who is assigning the correct metadata to the folders? How much does a Cambodian t-shirt cost anyway? Folder management is tricky for the sysadmin and easily abused by contributors, so keep their use to a minimum.
Here's a few pointers about using folders:
- Items inside a folder must have unique file names. If you try to drag into a folder a new file with the same filename as an existing item in that folder, it will become a new revision of the existing item.
- Items can be "deleted" from folders. This means they get moved to the "trash" folder. However those items still turn up in search results and appear in websites! You'll need to delete from the trash folder to destroy the item.
- Contribution Folders should only be present on your contribution instance. They should definitely not be used in consumption and there's little to no reason for using them on dev or testing environments.
- Should you require folders installed on two or more connected environments, keeping them in sync is problematic. There is no way to control the creation of folder IDs (it is sequential only) so you must use the replication procedure, which is a tricky thing to set up. Never create folders on the other environments or you'll break your replication.
- Each folder slows down your system. There is a default limit of 1000 folders. If you reach that limit... well, you're not using them properly. Read this post again!
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