Chapter 6. Content Management, Topics and Articles

Topic and Article management is the most extensively used feature of Midgard. Topics and Articles form hierarchical tree structures that begin with a root Topic and flow through sub-Topics until they eventually reach Articles. Article records can represent entire or partial text documents, calendar entries, news items or sub-articles. See Figure 6-1.

The Article up field is used to indicate whether an Article is a reply. This is exemplified with an on-line forum where the forum Topic is a container for the messages. Initial messages are stored as Articles with an up field of "0". The responses to forum messages are stored as replies to the Articles with an up field pointing to the initial Article.