#22 Common Content Such as Copyright

[Serkan]

Hello,

I have common content such as copyright. And I have a lot of products. So is there a way that common content to assign to all products? or How can I add copyright to all of products?

Regards,

[Detlef M.]

... same request from me!

But first some appraisal: I stumbled across Docmenta and had quite some "Wow!"-moments reading the docs. Docmenta contains a lot of thoughtful implementation and intuitive approaches and came close to be the hottest candidate for my future documentation tasks.

But then came this show-stopper. Sigh.
I definitely need to share nodes across products. In fact I would even like to put all nodes into a central pool and just link them into the products.
... which is the normal approach of commercial authoring systems.
Is there a solution which I didn't find?

Best regards!

[Manfred P.]

Maybe the term "product" (as it is used in Docmenta) is misleading. The original idea was, that different products should be independent of each other. That means if you change the content in one product, you should be sure that it has no impact on any other product (at least as soon as a product version is released). Furthermore, two different products could be stored at different locations in the filesystem (or one product is stored as plain files and the other is stored in a database). From a technical point of view, this makes it hard to create links between products.

However, I see two possibilities that may work for the described requirements:

1) Store the documentation of all products in a single Docmenta "product"
For example, you could have one Documenta product. For each of your product documentation create a separate section, as well as for the shared content:

 document_root
       +-  Product_A
       +-  Product_B
        ...
       +-  Shared_Content

The shared content can then be linked into the product documentation by using "Structural Inclusions" (see section "Structural inclusions" in the tutorial). For each of your products you can create one or more publications that use the corresponding section as content root. See chapter "Exporting publications" in the tutorial.

The disadvantage of this solution is that the amount of data stored in one Docmenta product may get quite large. Furthermore, Product_A, Product_B, ... share the same versioning. Another problem could be that currently it is not possible to assign user rights on section level, but only on product level . That means you cannot assign different user-rights to Product_A, Product_B, ... Though, in a future version of Docmenta it is planned to allow user-rights on section level.

2) Copy nodes (export / import)
If you want separate Docmenta products and you need to share content between products, you could export the nodes from one product (Context menu > Extra > Export Nodes) and import them into the other product (Context menu > Extra > Import Sub-Nodes). See section "Export, import and migration" in the tutorial (chapter "Advanced Tasks").

To simplify the process of copying nodes from one product to another, it would be possible to implement a plugin that exports nodes from one product and imports them into the target product in a single step. For example, the plugin could add a menu entry "Update External Content". When the user clicks the menu item, the plugin checks for nodes that have a specific comment attached, which identifies the node as external content. For example, a comment in the format "External[my_product_id:node_alias]" could be used to identify the location of the external content. If such a comment is found, the content identified by alias "node_alias" in the product "my_product_id" is copied into the current product (replacing the node with the comment attached). The comment is preserved, so that next time the user clicks the menu item, the nodes are copied again. However, this solution may not fit your requirements, because changes are not automatically reflected as long as the user does not click on "Update External Content". If you are interested in such a plugin, please let me know.

[Detlef M.]

For me, manual copying is too risky (to be forgotten).

Let me explain, what I am used to (commercial authoring system) and what I feel is a useful approach:

• All nodes are accessible via a central pool.
• Each node can be referenced should the author of the new document like it.
• As soon as a document gets released, all linked nodes get frozen.
• When viewing a document in its tree view, all linked nodes which are not in their latest version are marked. Therefore the author can check the changes of those nodes and decide whether the latest versions should be used in his document too.

That way you can use everything, independently of the original intention (often, a node becomes a standard although during its creation you didn't expect that).
Should you assume that the development of a node will divert at different documents (products), you can still decide to do a copy and let both nodes evolve to different things.

I am afraid that this will break your concept ...