Magnolia Concept Maps

Magnolia CMS Concept Maps are 'mind map' style diagrams where a central concept is surrounded by topics that correspond to areas in the official documentation and other sources. A Magnolia CMS Concept Map is not an organogram or hierarchical structure. A Magnolia CMS concept map is an at-a-glance information resource; it gives you a concept and shows the most immediately related Magnolia CMS concepts on one level (and maybe some IT and web concepts in general) and then one (max two or three...) sub levels of related information. We are not teasing out a concept. We are linking concepts to concepts in a neat visual way that invites the reader to delve deeper or to move on to another topic. We may also employ concept maps to show the exact relationship between related/connected concepts.

Rules

The the three laws of robotics, right now Magnolia CMS Concept Maps have three simple rules. I'll be honest and admit that these are more for convenience (i.e to keep thinsg simple) rather than based on any 'years of experience has tuagh this is the most fruitful approach' type of methodology...

1) Restrictive

Too many information bubbles and the map becomes confusing. The information should be relevant to Magnolia CMS. The Magnolia CMS rabbit hole is rich and wondrous enough; no need to show the visitor all around the whole of IT Wonderland. To draw an analogy, while a concept map of a 'car' might include 'chassis', it probably should not include 'chase'.

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2) Relevant

Keep the concept map relevant. Just because a topic is worth mentioning on a map doesn't mean that it deserves a map for itself. A good rule of thumb regarding the specificity of a possible map is 'take a step back'. Go up a level. Does a component merit a concept map? Or should component simply be a concept on a concept map called Template? Obviously everything is relevant. Instead of 'relevant' we could say 'appropriate'.

3) Relational

Make things become 'obvious' through clarification: not just repeat the obvious. Second level concepts on a Magnolia CMS Concept Map should be no more than one step removed from the central-concept. There's nothing wrong with having sub-levels of conceptually related topics, but a concept is in Magnolia CMS, then that concept is in some way related to everything else in Magnolia, so there's no need to expand the conceptual circle too far.

Modules as a starting point

As each module is a discrete unit the most obvious place to start with a Magnolia CMS Concept Map is with the Modules. For now the maps reside on the wiki, but in the long run they could make it to the official documentation. For example on the CAS module page the first thing a viewer sees is a concept map with the salient points/ideas related to CAS, they can then use the map to navigate to the LDAP page or to a page about ACLS.

Phased Approach

Phase 1 - Static Concept Maps

This is essentially the outline as above, but with a text back up that points to the relevant documentation section to the items mentioned on the concept map.

Phase 2 - Semi interactive Concept Maps

Mind maps become interactive and linked to Magnolia CMS documentation, wiki pages, other mind maps etc. through the use of hyperlinks.

Phase 3. - Fully Interactive Magnolia CMS Concept Map

Searcable, graphically pleasing, the fully interactive Concept Map allows a user to look around the Documentation, in the shape of an information sphere.