BluePrinting Naming Conventions. More Questions than Answers.

I wish I could explain the history behind various names I've seen in BluePrint design diagrams. But I have more questions than answers. Feel free to leave comments and/or explanations on your favorite BluePrint naming conventions.

000 Empty Parent vs 000 Scalability Parent

  • Form?
  • Function?
  • Habit? Was this diagram from a template or a copy of an existing BluePrint diagram?
  • I've also seen the layer called " Scalability  " but the publication in it called Empty Parent.

010 Functionality vs 010 Schemas and Categories

  • Does the name tell you what it's for or what to put in it?

020 Design vs 020 Layout

  • Does either capture functionality as well?
  • Is design a more sophisticated term?

040 www.createandbreak.net vs 040 Alvin's Blog

  • www. because it's the publishing website?
  • Or the function it serves?
  • Does it matter? It's easy enough to rename, right?

Master, Standard, Global

  • The word "Master" might make sense technologically (ever set the jumper settings on an old hard drive?), but can have strong negative connotations in the US
  • There's also the genealogy metaphor with "Parent"
  • I saw Standard on Manuel Garrido's post on BluePrinting and translation. "Standard Design" has a nice sound to it. 

100 vs 010 vs 10a and 10b

  • I'm used to 010, but realize exactly how many layers do we want to be able to scale to?)
  • SDL WCMS Senior Consultant Robert Mathieu pointed out the useful side affect of using suffixes in the naming convention--though theoretically at the same level, we can group Content Publications and Design publications in order alphabetically. I've also seen this achieved by prepending something like "Site - " before the publication name.
  • I've also seen prefixing the numbers with letters.
I really don't mind what you use as long as it's easy to use, easy to maintain, and consistent within an organization if at all possible.

As long as you have some semblance of the classic BluePrint diagram, we're speaking the same language.


3 comments:

  1. Lol @ Master & Slave :) i can so remember the vivid discussions we had in R&D during TDS4.0 where Marketing came in and told us we *REALLY* could not name them Master and Slave, as that was related too much to domination and submission, and that was ethically not done anymore :) (There were more situations in TechLand where this was under discussion, even the harddisks! My guess that the ones starting the discussion were just affraid of the BDSM scene ;)) So we came up with Parent and Child and changed all code, documentation, examples and training material :)

    Further OT:
    - I would not suggest ANY naming conventions and let the customer come up with naming conventions of their own, THEY need to find stuff, WE know our way arround or know HOW to find it :)
    - I would ask different teams to name only THEIR part of the tree (remember most people will only see anout 20% of the whole tree if things are setup correctly)
    - Numbering might make layers easier, but it will certainly make naming inside a layer harder (people are used to see website publications in alphabetical order, not numberred order)

    Nice post, keep up the good work alvin :)

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  2. +1 to the business-focused terms. It's interesting to get into the "what should we call this?" discussions where the answer is often "what do YOU want to call it?" I usually ending up learning as much as the customer, especially with mature teams that have been working with their systems (and naming conventions) for years.

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  3. I'm now trying out verbs for Publication names in my test VM.

    ReplyDelete

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