Magnolia Concept Maps

Magnolia CMS Concept Maps are 'mind map' style diagrams where a central concept is surrounded by topics that correspond to concepts/topics/areas in the official documentation, training material 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

Like 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 things simple) and are NOT based on any 'years of experience has taught us that 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'.

This rule seems pretty solid to me.

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, but we don't want to include everything! Instead of 'relevant' we could say 'appropriate'.

Again, this rule seems pretty solid.

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.

This rule could be amplified a bit. Maybe by relational we could mean the more obvious 'explains the relationship between the different object, elements and nodes on the map'.

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 first prototype concept maps reside on the wiki, but in the long run they could make it to the official documentation.

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 link to Magnolia CMS documentation, wiki pages, other mind maps etc. through basic hyperlinks.

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.

Enhancement points:

• Colour-coded nodes indicating that a page or component exists in our documentation.
• Coloured lines, firectional arrows for dependencies or to indicate hierarchy. So Template > Component, Page, Area > Web page
• Hover over augmentation. (User hovers over a node and suddenly it explodes to life.)
• Click nodes. Click to open and close a node. Move from one node to another, so....

User clicks CAS on the LDAP Concept Map...

... is taken to a CAS Concept Map

Phase 3 - Fully Interactive Magnolia CMS Concept Map

Searchable, graphically pleasing, the fully interactive Concept Map allows a user to look around the Documentation, in the shape of an interconnected information sphere with clickable nodes. Great for touch screen devices.