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System Architecture

This document is a somewhat dated description of the architectural layout and principles underlying the CMF.

Community-Originated Content

Overview

The CMF is aimed at content-oriented sites, much or all of which content is created and maintained by the members of the portal community. In order to make such content discoverable and useful to the community, the portal needs to collect a common core of metadata; the CMF uses the Dublin Core spec as the foundation for cataloguing and syndicating its content.

Key Interfaces

Portal Interface Relationships

  • Portal Objects Diagram

Tools for Building Community

Overview

A Portal is a site for managing a community's member-driven content. The portal's services are exposed to the members, and to the content objects they create, in the form of a set of "portal tools".

Each tool has a well-known name (e.g., portal_membership, portal_workflow, and should be unique within the portal. Each tool is required to implement a specified interface; content or code which needs the services of the tool should access those services only through its interface.

These interfaces define "plug points" at which the portal manager is free to substitute alternate tool implementations, piecemeal. For instance, a manager can start with a "stock" portal, and customize only the workflow by replacing the default portal_workflow tool with another which implements her site's workflow policies.

Existing Tools

Well-known name

Interface

portal_membership

Membership Tool

portal_registration

Registration Tool

portal_workflow

Workflow Tool

portal_catalog

Catalog Tool

portal_discussion

Discussion Tool

portal_actions

Actions Tool

portal_undo

Undo Tool

portal_metadata

Metadata Tool

Tool Relationships

  • Portal Tools Diagram