[Zope-CMF] Types, meta_type, content_meta_type, etc...

[Shane Hathaway]

Chris Withers wrote:
> Florent Guillaume wrote:
>>DublinCore's Type is presentation.
>>
> 
> ..no it's not. DublinCore's Type is exactly the same as the CMF content type. I
> don't see any reason for them to be different ;-)

I think I'm late in this thread, but I'm inclined to agree with Florent. 
  I've learned from recent customer work that DC "Type" has a meaning in 
people's minds that doesn't necessarily correspond with CMF's definition.

For this customer we built an "article" class and provided an "article" 
TypeInformation object.  But when they searched for articles, they 
wanted the "Type" to be "research report", "news release", "column", 
etc.  As their business changed, they wanted to be able to change the 
available types.  They would always choose the type from a list, but it 
should be easy to change the type of an existing object and changing an 
object's type shouldn't change its behavior.

 From an object-oriented perspective, that's all heresy.  But it's the 
Real World. :-)  I think I've learned that Dublin Core is not designed 
to be rigid or applied in a rigid way.

CMF's ability to map objects to different application functionality 
based on a simple, flexible attribute is very useful, of course.  But it 
would appear that that capability should not be mixed with Dublin Core, 
or at least not as deeply as it is now.

For our customer we had to make up a new field, internally representing 
the field under one name while displaying it as another.  It worked 
fine, but it's not ideal.

Shane