ocPortal Tutorial: Custom structured content (via CEDI)
Written by Chris Graham, ocProducts
This tutorial will describe the CEDI system, which is ocPortal's equivalent to a wiki.What does CEDI stand for?
The term 'CEDI' is a play on the phrase 'community database' ('CD'), such that it half-rhymes with and reads like 'wiki'. It also stands for 'Collaborative/Encyclopaedic Database Interface'.
Table of contents
About CEDI
Viewing a CEDI page |
Information is presented using Comcode and the Comcode attachment system, meaning there is excellent support for rich media. CEDI is ideal for storing collaboratively/interactively extended information with a high organisational factor; the speed of which information can be added is also particularly advantageous. This pattern works very well for types of ad-hoc guide, especially community-driven ones.
Note: When CEDI was created, wiki systems were obscure and hence CEDI was independently developed. We have since gone back and extended the system so that it can also behave just like a wiki as desired, but still maintains all the CEDI advantages and the possibility for authorative control.
Pages and posts
Making a CEDI post |
Pages may also contain a list of pages that are 'underneath' the page; however, a page can be underneath any number of pages, as the CEDI hierarchy is loosely defined (technically it is a node based network rather than a real tree structure). When pages are accessed from different paths, the path to the page as it has been accessed is displayed, so that back-tracking is easier, and that the user does not get confused by the path suddenly changing when they enter a 'child' page.
If you do not choose to develop a tree structure then CEDI navigation will be much like the navigation of a wiki- Comcode has special wiki-like support for making quick links between CEDI pages just by writing [[pagename]].
This simple structure of posts, pages, and children, is CEDI's core. There are of course peripheral features, such as:
- Giving pages some 'page text', which sits above the posts on that page; this text is staff decided, and thus provides an authoritative space.
- Jumping to a random page.
- Seeing a list of recent changes to the database.
- Moving posts.
Editing the CEDI tree |
- Merging posts.
- Viewing the tree structure of the whole database (transferred in a compressed format, and reduced so as only to show a single path to any page).
- Search
- Editing posts
This simplicity is key to the flexibility of the system- it is a system of control built around organised text, and how that text is used and structured is completely up to the website staff.
Maintenance
The full CEDI structure and content may be manipulated from the page-view screens of CEDI itself. CEDI pages are created on an adhoc basis, by either:- referencing them in the child-list for a page (available under the 'Edit Tree' button),
- or by referencing them via the special Comcode syntax ([[pagename]]).
In a typical set-up, staff are given access to modify the CEDI tree, whilst ordinary users rely on the Comcode syntax to create new inline links. Whether ordinary users are given access to add new pages can vary substantially between deployments, depending heavily on what role CEDI is being used for.
Moderation
As CEDI is (by default) open to posting by any user, you may feel it is necessary to moderate posts: especially as they may detract from the quality of the database. When a member posts, an e-mail is sent to the staff e-mail address: this will help you to moderate posts on the system, as they are made.It is possible to provide greater open-access to CEDI, so that anyone may edit all page details and navigation, in the same way that they may do so on a wiki. If you wish to enable the permissions for this (Security section of the Admin Zone, Global specific-permissions icon, CEDI section) then you will likely want to make use of the page history feature to revert unwanted changes, as well as ocPortal's site-wide tracing and moderation abilities.