a memo
Wow, this is nuts. I've been designing ways to make aliases of objects in cms, and the latest approach is one I really like -- the alias has its own metadata, but always uses the original's content.
But just this morning (the benefits of sleeping in, right Fund-mates?) I realised that I could use this kind of alias to let users create their own presonalized copies of objects.Enabling Virtual Personal Space
These are not Private Objects in the sense that they aren't published to the WWW. They are Personal Objects, and may be Public or Private. They exist as rich aliases in a user's Virtual Personal Space.What? Virtual means that the user can switch on a filter and see only their Personal Objects at a site. For the sake of compatibility with existing metaphors, you might label this MyDocuments or something. But really, the user is looking at their Personal Objects throughout the site. (This needs to be benchmarked against collecting them all somewhere, which is easy enough to do. It's the flexibility (and the ability to find other user's Public Personal Objects) that I'm excited about.)Public Personal Objects
Because Personal / Official is a different flag from Public / Private, we get the bonus of having Public Personal Objects. Users viewing a resource may reasonably expect, if they can make their own personal copies of that resource, that they can show off those personal copies to others."Here is my annotated version of that report, with corrections."
"Here is my reading of that book."
"Here is an unoffcial translation of this page into Hmong."
... and so on.A Better Collaborative Workflow
Rather than checking-out a resource to make changes, or (god forbid) having to maintain a separate content development environment in order to keep changes off the public site, we will create a Personal Object whenever a resource is opened for editing.
All revision is done on the Personal version. I suspect we'll find that we can manage multiple Personal versions in order to track changes made by various authors, but at the very least different users can work in parallel on their own Personal copies, and then the revisions can be merged later in the process.
More likely, the process will be iterative, with each successive editor making their own Personal Copy of the previous editor's Personal Copy, and so on through how ever many iterations it takes to come up with a publishable version, which is then "Officialized", overwriting the Official Object.
edit ->
merge ->
{
Author's Personal Copy }
Official Object Fact-Checker's Personal Copy Revised Official Object Editor's Personal Copy
By Chris Snyder on January 29, 2005 at 10:48am