I think the ultimate solution here is to recognize that content types are complex objects that need to be defined based on one or more ontologies. Joomla's sections and categories, Plone's folders and keywords, and Drupal's multiple controlled vocabularies, are all increasingly more capable means of capturing content type atttributes and metadata, but all of them are far less flexible (and ultimately less usaeful) than the approaches being used for the semantic web and modern controlled medical vocabularies. In some of the examples above, posters have indicated a need to display and sort content based on both attributes as well as categories. If we used the Web Ontology Language to define our content types, and then based the CMS on this, we could easily achieve this flexibility. For example, I would like my university (where I am Chair of the committee that oversees the entire web site) to have a university wide, academic publication list that each faculty member and student could contribute to and generate web listings. For instance, all of my publications would appear on my home page and could be edited, searched, sorted in various ways, and so on. I might want publications by year, by type (journal, conference, book chapter), by first author, by status (in press, submitted, unpublished, published), or by review status (peer reviewed, non-peer reviewed, invited), and so on. I also want related publications to show up on my research project pages, so I'll need to include metadata about which project(s) each publications is associated with. My school will want a listing of all publications from all of its faculty and students, so now we need to get a listing of publications based on affiliations of the authors of those publications. Thus, author is another content type with its own attributes whose values come from controlled vocabularies. Note that it isn't good enough to restrict the publication list based on author name, such as "Johnson, T." because at a large site there may be many "Johnson, T.s" Content objects need attribute values that are themselves other content objects. In this way, even if there were 5 Johnson, T.s the system would know which publications were written by each of them.
The Web Ontology Language (OWL) gives us all of this flexibility. The difficulty for CMS developers is to figure out how to harness the power of OWL in a way that is user friendly for developers and end users.
Todd
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