The Metadata Plugin Metadata Management for Manila

Site last updated 2/24/2006; 12:33:21 PM

Home Why Features FAQ Updates Documentation Download Developers Bugs Feedback Discuss Planned Features				Scenarios Scenario 1: Simple Metadata Meet Bill. All Bill wants is to have a site on the web that's easy to update and will rank high in search engines. Bill knows that search engines look for mysterious things called META tags, and that these tags somehow help his search engine rankings. His brother-in-law mentioned that he should use the keywords and description tags. Bill's first goal is to have a site that's easy to update. That's why he chose Manila. His second goal is to add keywords and description tags to his pages. For that, he chose the Metadata Plugin. Bill has a copy of Frontier with which he's set up a Manila site. He's downloaded and installed the Metadata Plugin. Now he clicks on metaData in the Editors-only menu: He creates two meta types: description - this field will hold a brief description of what's on the page keywords - keywords describing concepts on the page Note that Bill has chosen to index keywords but not to index description. That's a good choice. It is quite plausible that at some point down the road Bill might want to find all the pages that contain a certain keyword. But finding a page that contains, word-for-word, a description that you type in is not a likely scenario. He has also chosen to include both metadata types in the HEAD element of his web pages. For Bill, that's the whole point. He wants search engines to be able to see the metadata on his pages. Now when Bill creates a new story, his form looks like this: Note that he has two more fields at the bottom! He can enter his description and keywords there. The system will save them along with his story. Not only that, it will automatically insert the appropriate META tags in his web page. Don't believe me? Check out the source code for this page. Maybe someday Bill will use that keyword index the system has been creating. It would be easy to do. Let's find out how many pages on this site use the keyword "metadata". We could go through and look at the HTML source code for each page, but that would be a pain. So we do this by using a handy macro, like this: {metaDataMacros.searchkw("keywords","metadata")} Here's the output from that macro on this site: [Macro error: Internal database error: attempted to read a free block. Try to Save a Copy and relaunch with the new database.] The list above was dynamically generated when you loaded this page. Now take it a step further. We could write another macro that inserts a form on a page. The user enters a keyword in the form, and the computer returns a list of pages that matched. Presto! A search engine. These same techniques can be used to create any kind of metadata field you want. You don't have to stop at keywords and description. These same techniques will work for any meta type. Scenario 2: Automatic Site Index This has been moved to a separate page. Scenario 3: Multiple Templates This has been moved to a separate page. Scenario 4: Online Publication In a nutshell, this is where you want to have a publication with articles in different categories. Each article has keywords associated with it. You want to be able to look up related articles by using the keywords. A sample publication that uses this method is here. See the Related Articles boxes on some of the articles? The ability of the query macro to show related items is key to doing such a site. User-Submitted Scenarios Medical Publications Showing related pages Comments...