Rethinking Feeds/Categories and Private Pages

[Paul Stovell]

I think there's an opportunity to simplify a lot of FunnelWeb concepts by making a few design changes. 

I think there are three "states" a page can be in (these are the best names I can come up with):

• Private - you're composing it, but only logged in users can see it
• Public Page - anyone can see it, but it doesn't appear on the Recent page or in RSS feeds
• Public Blog Post - anyone can see it, and it appears on the Recent page and in RSS feeds

Suppose we implement those three states in FunnelWeb, so that when editing a page, you choose the state from a list of radio buttons. 

Next, we change the 'feeds' feature to be called 'categories'. You tick the categories the page (not the revision, as its currently implemented) is associated with. You can consume the site-wide RSS feed (all public blog posts), or a category-specific feed, using the existing URL format.

Finally, we change the RSS feeds and /Recent lists to just select from Published entries and order by PublishDate, rather than any kind of feed silliness. 

I think it would simplify all the issues we have around dates, and makes it easier to understand what's going on. 

The one feature we would lose is re-publishing an old page in the feed. But realistically, you can achieve the same effect just by changing the PublishDate anyway. And in a year and a half of using FunnelWeb, I never used that feature anyway :)

I'm keen to take a crack at this and bring FunnelWeb more in line with normal blogging engines. 

Paul

[Matt Hamilton]

+1. This.

 

This is actually much more in line with how Graffiti handles posts and pages.

 

How hard will this be, Paul? A lot of it is just terminology changes but I’m guessing there’s at least one database upgrade in there too.

[Andrew Tobin]

Why use categories instead of tags that would already be on the post, and do some type-ahead, or drop-down/checkbox scenario for existing tags?

Just thinking you could do a RSS feed based off any particular tag, or a tag-search page, etc.

[Aaron Powell]

Interesting thought, why not make the feeds come out as OData, so you can just provide people a query for a feed of a particular category, so Umbraco posts would be /feeds/?category=Umbraco

That will allow you to have combination feeds (Umbraco & Orchard), and other cool stuff
Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Paul Stovell]

Great point, it would definitely be nice to not have Feeds/Categories + Tags - we could implement a tag selector like this:

http://neimke.blogspot.com/2011/01/create-delicious-user-interface-for.html

When you use a tag that didn't exist before, we could dynamically create the tag record. 

Paul

[Aaron Powell]

StackOverflow style ;)

We'll have to have a migration step in this to update all existing posts

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Paul Stovell]

Definitely a database upgrade, though it should be possible to do without breaking anything. I don't think it would be a *huge* amount of work, I can probably do it tonight. 

Paul

[Paul Stovell]

Yep. Our migration could even look at your existing keywords (which are kind of tags), split them out, and create and populate the Category records, so you don't have to edit any old posts. 

Paul

[Aaron Powell]

Just need to string-split the current categories, then map them into a new table. Think you can do it entirely in SQL :P

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Aaron Powell]

http://code.google.com/p/funnelweb/source/browse/?r=tag-refactor

http://code.google.com/p/funnelweb/source/browse/src/FunnelWeb.Tests/Web/Controllers/TagControllerTests.cs?r=tag-refactor

It's a start ;)

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Matt Hamilton]

Cool. So you’re thinking we have a TagController so we can visit /tag/foo and see all the posts tagged with “foo”?

I guess in terms of feeds we keep the FeedController, and where we’re currently passing a “feedName” to the Feed method (to get to a given feed) we’d be passing a tag instead. So the feed for posts tagged with “foo” would be at /feed/foo. Does that sound about right?

[Aaron Powell]

Not quite, that controller is for the internal workings of FunnelWeb, how you do a lookup of the autocomplete and stuff

As I said before (and maybe i should create a new thread) I think the feed should be OData

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Paul Stovell]

I'm not familiar with odata, I'd like it if you could explain more.

So in your change set, how far along are you? I was just writing some SQL scripts to create the new tag tables, but if you've already made a start...

Paul

[Matt Hamilton]

Ah right. Yeah, surfacing the posts as OData feeds (which are just ATOM feeds anyway), makes total sense. Heck, if it was an updatable feed then we’d have an API right there.

[Aaron Powell]

I've just written out a series of test scenarios and a stub repository interface.

No persistance or UI started

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Paul Stovell]

OK, here's a SQL script that will be part of the migration (there's a second part to drop the current columns, but I'll do that later)

I just ran it over a backup of PaulStovell.com and it seems to work OK. Can you run it over a backup :) of your databases and see how it behaves?

(You can get a backup from the StudioCoast database page)

https://gist.github.com/782423

[Matt Hamilton]

I have a backup at home so I can give it a try tonight.

 

From: Paul Stovell

Sent: Monday, January 17, 2011 1:44 PM

To: funnel...@googlegroups.com

[Paul Stovell]

Just updated the script at that gist to include dropping the tables/columns, and building a "tag cloud" - here's mine:

wpf 59

magellan 38

mvc 13

navigation 10

mvvm 9

silverlight 8

binding 7

.net 6

c# 6

visual-studio 4

patterns 3

[Matt Hamilton]

Script ran successfully! I’d post my tag cloud but this was a backup I took quite some time ago when there were only ~8 posts. It was definitely an up to date version of the database schema though.

 

Matt

[Paul Stovell]

Great. I added some changes for the 'status' column on entries now, and most of the app is working. Should be able to check in shortly :)

Paul

[Matt Hamilton]

Deploy somewhere so we can see! Either FWHQ or your own site?

[Aaron Powell]

How goes the unit tests I wrote, they all passing ;)

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Paul Stovell]

Nope. There's no such thing as a 'TagController' in my version :)

[Aaron Powell]

So you're not having an auto-complete for the tags?

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Paul Stovell]

Not yet, main focus was just to get it working (which it does), then spice it up later. 

[Aaron Powell]

That's what the controller was for :P

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Paul Stovell]

Alright, I've just pushed this. 

http://paulstovell.com/

You can see a list of tags appearing under my posts. They're hyperlinks, but they don't go anywhere yet. 

They also appear on the post for the page:

When you edit a page, you still type them in as comma, semi-colon or space seperated:

Note that this means:

• Tags can't have spaces - they have to be dashes
• They'll be converted to lowercase
• They can contain other symbols, like #, but we'll have to make sure we url encode them properly

When you run the database upgrade script, this happens for you automatically

Lastly, when you write a page, you get to control the access level:

Private pages are still public - I'll fix that shortly. But pages that aren't Blog Post won't appear in the feed.

Paul

[Matt Hamilton]

That’s a great start! Will the tags eventually link to a page that lists all posts with that same tag? And I imagine that page would be serving up a feed.

 

Coming along very nicely!

[Paul Stovell]

Dare you to deploy it to your site :)

Paul

[Matt Hamilton]

Do you double dare me?

[Aaron Powell]

So any issue merging in the branch and starting on an autocomplete now?

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Paul Stovell]

Nope - go right ahead. I won't be doing any work on FW tomorrow :(

Paul

[Aaron Powell]

Oh noes, are you going to have to do client work? How rude :P

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Paul Stovell]

Yeah, I think my free ride here is coming to an end :)

[Matt Hamilton]

So what are our plans in terms of making the tags link to a list of posts, and having tag-specific feeds?

 

Do we reuse the WikiController’s Recent method such that it takes a tag name and produces a page the same as the home page except just for posts with that tag? I don’t know what the route would be, but perhaps something like /tagged/foo to show all posts with the “foo” tag.

 

Likewise the FeedController’s Feed method could take a tag name too, giving us a route like /feed/foo to show an ATOM feed for all posts with the “foo” tag.

 

That would keep things simple, but perhaps you guys had something else in mind, like putting all that logic into the TagController and having special routes like /tag/foo/recent and /tag/foo/feed.

 

It’d be interesting to allow the tag name parameter to be a space-separated list. You could subscribe to the /feed/comicster+halfwit feed to get news just on those projects.

[Aaron Powell]

I was thinking that /feed/tag will return you a feed for that tag.

We could build a simple DSL down the track like so do:

/feed/+umbraco/-orchard/+mvc

And then have basic tag queries

The /tag/* route will be internal only and used for the autocomplete IMO.

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Matt Hamilton]

That sounds great then. The DSL for tag queries would be a nice addition too.

 

How about viewing lists of posts for a given tag? Does /tagged/<tag name> make sense as the route?

[Aaron Powell]

Hmm yeah I guess it does

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Paul Stovell]

I like /tagged

[Miguel Madero]

I think it woudl be nice to use the same route for the Html and the feed just with a different extension since they essentially represent the same resource.

 

tagged/foo

tagged/foo.rss

tagged/foo.atom

 

That's the approach the Rails take and it makes sense.

--
Miguel A. Madero Reyes
www.miguelmadero.com (blog)
m...@miguelmadero.com

[Matt Hamilton]

That does make sense, except what happens if a user defines a tag called foo.rss? That’s a legal tag AFAIK. Something to ponder anyway.

[Aaron Powell]

Disagree, cuz where would you're "master" feed sit at? /tagged/ or something?

/feed/tagName makes sense to me as you're looking for a feed which is tagged in a particular way.

Aaron Powell
Umbraco Core Team Member

http://www.aaron-powell.com | http://twitter.com/slace | Skype: aaron.l.powell | MSN: aaz...@hotmail.com

[Matt Hamilton]

Another good argument against.

[Miguel Madero]

What about tag/feed instead of tag.feed?

 

tagged/foo/feed

 

That keeps it consistent with the master feed, not sure if foo/feed is a valid tag name. Also, I woudl like to subscribe to pages. I don't think that feeds should be unique to tags. For example, in some wikis I'm subscribing to pages and sub-pages and then they send diffs with the changes. Good example is I want to subscribe to the projects or presentations, but I don't care about blog posts.

 

So a bunch of Urls

myblog.com/feed     <-- master

myblog.com/projects/feed    <-- feed for a page

myblog.com/tagged/foo/feed   <-- feed for a tag

myblog.com/tagged/foo+bar/feed   <-- feed for a set of tags