Create a CMF Topic

Actor: Site Manager

One of the ways you can manage the structure of a CMF site is by using CMF Topics. Often a site is comprised of a large amount of content through which visitors are able to navigate. A Topic allows you to create a dynamic view onto the available content enabling visitors to "drill down" into that content.

Topic objects define a set of search criteria. Those criteria are applied to the content catalog to produce a virtual list of content that appear "in" that Topic (though that content is not actually physically contained in the Topic object). The search criteria for a topic may be based on any of the data or metadata of your site content.

One common and useful piece of metadata that can be used effectively by Topics is "Subject". The "Subject" property is usually configured to allow a set of categories to be associated with a piece of content at the time it is created. If content creators consistently select appropriate categories for content as it is created, a Topic can be used to provide site visitors categorized views of your site. A standard pattern is to create a number of Topics that each correspond to a particular category.

Another example of a useful Topic is one which filters your site content by creation or modification date in order to display all recently changed content.

To create a new Topic, navigate to the place where you want to add the new Topic, then click the "Folder Contents" link in the actions box. This will bring up the "desktop" view of the current Folder. From the desktop view, click the "New..." button.

You will now see the "Add Content" form. This form provides a list of the kinds of objects you can add at this location (based on the permissions you have), and descriptions of the available objects. Note that you must have the "Add portal topics" permission to add Topic objects.

Select "Topic" from the listing, enter an id for the new Topic in the "id" field located below the listing of available object, and click the "Add" button to add the new Topic.

After submitting the add form, you will be taken to the "Edit Topic" form of the newly created Topic. The Topic edit form allows you to provide some basic information about the Topic:

• Title -- The title to be used for the Topic. The title provides a more human-friendly label for the Topic and appears in the default pages that display the Topic. Providing a title is optional, but recommended.
• Description -- A short description of the Topic. This description may be made available with syndicated content and may be used by some of the default user interface elements of the site. Providing a description is optional, but recommended.
• Acquire criteria from parent -- This checkbox determines whether the search criteria of this topic should be combined with the search criteria of containing Topic objects when constructing the virtual contents list. Selecting this option (the default) allows you to provide progressively narrower drill-down views of your content by building a heirarchy of Topics that refine the searches of higher level Topics.

Click the "Change" button to save the changes to the Topic object. After clicking "Change," you will see the default view of your new Topic (the list of content which match the Topic's criteria and the list of the Topic's criteria). Note that since you have not yet defined any criteria, the Topic will match all content objects in the site content catalog.

Continue configuring your topic by adding search criteria .