DublinCore Metadata
So, most of us have heard of DublinCore before, which is why I'm not going to into a long spiel introducing it. What I want to talk about is the lack of use it gets. Realistically, no one is using DublinCore in an exposed useful manner . Meaning, when my developer cap is on I can easily pull DublinCore associated data from an object. When my administrative or user cap is on it becomes near impossible. Exposing this metadata set is important! As a user I want to know what the rights are, or who created a specific object/resource/page whatever. As a developer I'd like to pull this data and mash it up with my own development.
Yes, I know what you just said. The meaning for the terms in the element set are so obtuse that it can be interpreted almost in any fashion. Thinking about the possibilities becomes almost mind numbing. .oO "Simply the standard is broken by not being specific enough Mr. Christopher, blah blah, lets hit this beach". "Whatever dude, who cares.. no one. that's who. No one gives a shit, pardon me while I drink this beer..." It need not be so however. Instead of recreating ones own metadata set which is doing the same exact thing. We should be looking towards exposing this data and then ADVERTISING that it's available. It's also easy to simply generate the required data for most of the 15 resources with ease.
How does this help? Well, at the very least people who respect each others Copyrights/Rights and would like to give attribution will know exactly who or what institution to give it to. As well as helping to nail down where data originates etc. It's not perfect by any means and the holy grail solution most likely exist in a W3C standard that gets accepted by the major browsers.
In the meantime maybe it's high time the DCMI community came up with some badges that simply state "This site or resource is DubliCore aware" or "These resources have DublinCore metadata attached" or just a graphic that highlights that we can indeed review or pull the metadata. There is a nice plugin for Firefox called Dublin Core Viewer that does this. Also exposing the data as naturally as possible ie: "Creator" == name of user or some such is also generally good behavior. "Goddd, you're still yapping about this?? Ronnie, pass me another beer.. i'm gonna leave if you keep talking this clickety-click bullshit".
ok.. I'm done... for now.
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Extending a default Plone Content Type commentary
So you want to extend a default Plone Archetype Content Type. You start saying to yourself, i'm actually recreating an event content-type why not just utilize Plones existing type. You know about archetypes.schemaextender [1]and are thinking to yourself. This is going to be a cake walk. I'll just adapt whatever content-type, lets say in my case ATEvent. You then waltz along saying to yourself let me reorder the schemata order. However, you can not do this. That sucks. Then you start thinking to yourself, maybe I shouldn't use archetypes.schemaextender. I mean, it's getting a little silly with all of these workarounds I'm doing for the most basic content-type stuff. It's obvious I want to do more than just add an option or two onto the main content type. Yeah that's the ticket i'll be adding new methods, browser views, candy, ponies, etc. So you decide that you will subclass one of the main plone Archetype content types and be happy. Unfortunately you then realize, you're basically copying the whole content type out of Plone and recreating it.
This is when a light bulb goes off even though it's ever so dim; you just need to make your own content-type. If you're lucky enough, you would of already did all the work like myself and will just need to continue on. The bright idea of you reusing Plone AT Content types for more than just a boolean option or some string material is just a dumb idea. Seriously, it's just a dumb idea.
You may still think it is a bright idea. I really mean it. It is not. Go ahead.. Try it. I'll wait........
See? Dumb idea. If you were smart and heeded this advice without trying it then you've just saved yourself a couple of hours worth of work. So when is it a good idea to use archetypes.schemaextender? Well if you need some minor annotation to an overall content type it makes sense. Usually information that you won't have to display readily or override views for. You know, like a boolean option that will trigger a subscriber or some such. Or some other tiny bit of stringfield information where it's just a tiny change and not much of the overall schema is being modified. When you start talking about more than that, just go with your initial gut feeling and do your own thing. If you really want the functionality from the default Plone content type you can always rip it out and throw it into your own content-type.
Now today doesn't feel like such a waste. Cheers.