One of the reasons I and others swear by Conversant to manage our web sites it that 90 percent of the time if I think of a really cool feature I’d like to have, I can create it myself without having to know any programming or having to hope enough other people want it to make it worth the developer’s time to code it.

For example, here’s a problem I run into repeatedly. Whenever I write an article I usually list all of the sources I used for the article at the very end. The problem is that more often than not those particular articles are 404 even just a month after I’ve posted. If I want to go back and reference those articles again, I have to hope their in Google’s cache or that somebody else might have a copy.

So it hit me the other day that the obvious way to prevent this problem in the future would be to simply store copies of any articles used as sources along with the article itself. That took me about 15 minutes to set up.

First, I created a custom field called “Sources_Full_Text.” This created a basic text field that is assigned to every post included in the database.

Second, I modified the message editing template so that administrators (i.e. me) now have an additional text entry box called “Sources.” All I have to do is copy and paste the text of source articles into there.

Third, I don’t want to get into legal trouble by giving everyone access to this material — this is really only for my later potential use. So, I used a conditional macro that checks to see a) does a particular article have anything in the sources_full_text field and b) if so, is the person viewing the article and administrator. If both of those are true, then there is a link added at the very bottom of the article to a page that will display the text included in that field.

Total time to add this feature: about 15 minutes.

Total additional cost: $0

Never having to worry about those articles going 404 again: priceless.

Macrobyte recently added a few features to Conversant (the CMS/groupware system that drives this web site) that I had requested. The one that made the biggest difference on this site was an additional field of metadata for directories.

A brief re-cap here: everything on this site is saved as an entry in a database. Various macros are then used to build page templates and manipulate the various entries six-ways-to-Sunday. Each page on this site has a number of user-created metadata fields as well as some system-specific metadata, including a Navigation Title and Page Title (i.e., so you could sort on the Navigation Title but display the Page Title). Unfortunately, directories only had the Navigation Title.

That was a problem on this site, because I ended up with directories that I wanted to sort in one way but display in another. For example, this list of Wizard of Oz books on this site should sort “The Wizard of Oz” as “Wizard of Oz, The”. Before, it could not do that. Now it handles it just fine. Now, my complete site map is a thing of beauty.

I also should add that I am constantly amazed at the ease-of-use of Conversant’s redirect feature. As other recent discussions about creating a taxonomy for weblogs have noted, coming up with a taxonomy is an enormous undertaking, and I tend to organize mine haphazardly. The ability to move an entire directory and then redirect the old pages to the new ones quickly and easily is extraordinarily helpful. This way I can change and revise my categories anytime I please without worrying about creating lots of 404 errors for users.