An Example of the Flexibility of Conversant’s Metadata Tools
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.
Tags: Conversant
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Nov 28th, 2003
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