Should I organize content in content repositories like I do in file systems?

Question

How should I structure content in a content repository like http://jackrabbit.apache.org/?

Should the content be structured like I do in the file system? I can't find any information on this what so ever anywhere.

Answer 1

Thinking of JCR as a "file system on steroids" is often a good idea to help structure content. In Adobe CQ for example we use a tree that's fairly similar to a unix filesystem, with /libs, /apps, /etc, /var, /content etc. That helps make sense of the content, separate between system and user content and also helps setup the overall access control.

In my opinion this makes a lot of sense for the macro structure of your content, i.e. the overall organization of things. Once you get down to micro structures that represent content pages or other data I usually forget about the filesystem and think in terms of abstract and extensible micro-trees.

http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/DavidsModel also has good pointers on how to structure content.

My "JCR view of the world" talk, from Berlin Buzzwords 2012, gives a number of examples of how to structure JCR content, the video is at http://vimeo.com/44298693

Answer 2

Yes. From here,

In addition to a hierarchically structured storage...

Hierarchical in the sense of folders containing files and other folders.

Answer 3

Jackrabbit (which is opensource) is not much popular but Adobe Day CQ built it's Content Repository on top of Jackrabbit, which is quite popular.

Mostly you need to worry about resources path (XML like to get/store content) don't need to worry about the real file structures/locations.