Re: [pLog-General] Custom fields and metadata

[Oscar R. <os...@re...>]

> Maybe instead, metadata display can be an optional field that users 
> can turn on or off, as opposed to an optional custom field.  I think I 
> need more details on how it would work though.  Can you explain to me 
> how metadata is displayed?
> We insert resource(s) and they are either listed as a link or image 
> displayed (or with my mediahandler plugin, other scenarios)... so does 
> the metadata available for only one resource file per post?

One thing that I was requested and that I added to the roadmap was the 
possibility to have custom fields in the sense that if you are for 
example writing about books often, then you could add a field called 
"ISBN" and pLog would automatically display it in the "New Post" page. 
In order to display it in the post page in the public side, then a 
couple of changes would be needed to the templates but since this is a 
very specific change, we decided that users should take care of those 
changes. Needless to mention, these custom fields are also integrated 
with the new search engine.

The other feature we discussed about was the possibility to have 
metadata keywords in post, for two reasons: first, we could add <meta 
name="keywords" ...> or <meta name="description" ...> tags to the pages 
and second, the search engine should take the metadata as well as the 
text itself when running searches so that for example, if we write 
about Oracle but at no point mention the acronym "RDBMS", we could 
define it as a metadata keyword so that when users search for "rdbms" 
in our site, this particular article would be returned even though the 
word is not mentioned in the text.

I have already implemented custom fields and my idea was that if you 
abstract the concepts of these two features, one can easily implement 
the second one using the first because after all, metadata is nothing 
more than a custom field attached to every post. My suggestion was that 
if we consider metadata a key feature for next version, we could 
release pLog configured so that it comes with one default field called 
"metadata", and configure the templates so that out of the box, they 
are capable of showing the metadata. Later on if users want to get rid 
of the custom field, it's as easy as removing it from the admin 
interface... On the other hand, we can also not do so, describe this 
technique in the wiki and let the users configure it themselves :)

This metadata that we've been talking so far has nothing to do with the 
metadata that is extracted from resources, but it just reminded me that 
we could discuss whether the search engine should search also through 
resources and not only articles... Would be interesting, don't you 
think?

Maybe if I have time I could configure an additional pLog based on the 
current development branch in www.plogworld.org, hidden in some folder 
so that people don't mess around with it... then you could see better 
how it works. You know, an image is worth a 1000 words :)

But I hope it's somehow clear now :)

Oscar