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    • 44580
    • 189 Posts
    Not suggesting that the following is the answer, just suggesting that the answer may be out there: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Hierarchy or http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Hierarchy. Quack.

    (PS: The urls are being screwed up by the colons in them)
      • 38850
      • 110 Posts
      Quote from: gissirob at Dec 30, 2014, 01:03 AM
      Not suggesting that the following is the answer, just suggesting that the answer may be out there: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Hierarchy or http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Hierarchy. Quack.

      (PS: The urls are being screwed up by the colons in them)

      I'm blinded by the ugliness of WIKIs. grrr
        • 44580
        • 189 Posts
        They can be made to dance, but I take your point.
        • I don't believe that the number of contexts matters, it's just a table in the database after all. But that's only one way it could be organized.

          There is a tree_root_id setting which you can use for each user to limit him to a single branch on the Tree when editing, so each user would only have access to his book in the Manager without the need for fussing with ACLs, although there are ways of simplifying the creation and assignment of the necessary groups and Media Sources when a user is created, either by an Admin user or with the Register snippet, using plugins.

          There are a couple of nice extras like Collections and GridClassKey for organizing child resources and not showing them in the Tree. These can be nested, in which case the nested containers will show in the tree, but not their children. This could be used for chapters, so in the Tree you would only see each book and its chapters.

          And of course there is ContentBlocks, which could handle each book in one resource, unless we're talking about War and Peace here. Even so, War and Peace has 9,609,000 characters, and the content field of the site_content table is a mediumtext which can hold between 5,592,415 and 16,777,215 UTF-8 characters, so you could at least give War and Peace a run for its money.

          NewsPublisher could even be used to keep the whole thing in the front-end, no Manager access at all. Add a little AJAX to the table of contents in such a situation and you could even have drag-and-drop organization of chapters and pages. It's just a matter of resetting the menuindex of the resources with the same parent on the back-end.

          Really, with a little imagination, there's nothing MODX can't do, and it pretty much already has all of the add-ons you would need for several variations on this use-case. After all, MODX is really an application framework, with a CMS as its default application. And a CMS is basically a document management system, and a book is just a document.
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