Lots of types

I missed the MicroContent types supported by the new SB-plugin. Norman d'Arcy has a relevant screen shot. The list of types is very nice. The plugin allows for publication of various events (concert, conference, event), lists (links, playlist, list), media (audio, image, video), reviews (album, book, cafe, club/bar, event, hotel/resort, local service, magazine, move/TV, restaurant, software, song, website) and showcase (group, people).

I do not know what all mean, nor what the implications are for the structure of each Item. I miss locational MicroContent types, i.e. types with a geographic location. Interestingly they found it necessary to add an event as review and as event. So what is the difference?

The one example that Norman d'Arcy shows gives me the impression that these MicroContent types can be very structured. So is all this structure only added to each blog item description field? Or is it also stored in a structured database? I guess it is the former. One should have an underlying XML database for the latter.

[Inspiration Norma d'Arcy]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type
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You asked: “is all this structure only added to each blog item description field?”

Yes. This is the way the current extensions work. The description element is the most important place to put the structured data at first. Getting the data into a database would enable many very interesting applications, however, one needs to walk before you run… Also, those “interesting” applications aren’t interesting to everyone. First things first.

Putting the structured data in the description element makes it easy for the item’s “editor” to recognize it and process it during creating/editing the item. Also, by being in the description field, which is typically either HTML or XHTML, the structured data will be propagated forward to the (X)HTML pages that often render the item. This means that search engines and web crawlers can find the data and do interesting things with it.

I’m sure that people will come up with all sorts of innovative database-oriented applications for the data published with Structured Blogging. However, the intent at this point is to enable the most basic forms of Structured Blogging. Complexity should wait until later—or, until someone has a clearly defined and pressing need for the more complex approaches. Fortunately, we’ve released our Structured Blogging extensions under an open-source license. Thus, I’m hoping that folk who want more power, complexity, etc. will feel free to use the initial extensions as a labor saving foundation for their experimentation with new ideas.

bob wyman

Fine, I agree with the approach. However in my current set-up with Expression Engine, I have the possibility to store everything in the database. And that is what I did with reviews, etc. And I can output into any format I want. So for me personally the question is how I can keep up with standards, etc.

As a next step I would like to create more complex Microcontent Types, such as recipes (with ingredients lists and more complex schema’s). That requires however different and more complex database structures (which are around the corner for my set-up). My recipe-blog now uses the everything in the description field approach.

But I agree with you (s Marc Canter just tells me in the podcast): first things first.

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