Remember opening GX WebManager for the first time? It all made sense, didn't it? Tree of pages on the left side, content on the right side. Easy as π.

In come the Page Sections and the Media Repository and they fsck it all up! I already touched on the subject of page sections before, so I will leave them alone for now. Naw, this time let's focus on the Media Repository.

Why?

Why a media repository in the first place, one might wonder. Well, while a page hierarchy is nice for structuring content, not all content allows itself to be boxed this easily. In fact, often articles would fit in more than one place in the hierarchy. An article could fall in the category "JavaOne coverage" and at the same time be stored under "May 2008 News Archive".

This is where the media repository comes to the rescue! Having an article stored in a large bowl with all other articles allows you to just handpick (or automatically pick - it's your party) the relevant articles and display them wherever you want to. Tag the article "JavaOne2008" and "News" and all you need to do is add media overview elements with the right settings to retrieve links to relevant articles.

More of the same

Media overview elements also allow for some nice trickery. Ever noticed that "Context dependent: Content related" checkbox? Brilliant stuff, that!

Try the following:

•  Go to "Configure > Web Initiative Configuration > Special Pages" and make sure a page is assigned to "Default Media Repository page".
• Create a page section with a media overview on it. Tick the "Context dependent: content related" checkbox, leave the rest alone.
• Go to the default media repository page and assign the newly made page section to it (using "File > Properties > Assign page sections to page...").

Now all you need to find is a link to some labelled article. Put a media overview element on some testpage to conjure up some links to articles. Follow the link to the article and - lo and behold! - the page section should be showing related articles!

If you are using database pages, something similar can be done with the "Based on references (only for database pages)" checkbox option and media repository term references.

I'll leave that one as excercise for the reader.

Enough with the explaining already! Being fresh back from my scuba diving holiday to sunny Egypt, I want to share with you my close encounter with the Dugong at Marsa Abu Dabab (actually, the movie is not mine, kudos to the maker for posting it):

See you next time,

Patrick