I came up with a way to track navigation through hierarchies of content packages today. The goal of this method is to track position/path within a nested set of content packages, without modifying the content packages themselves. MVC... The content package becomes M, and my method becomes C. Now, to build a way to V the two...
I think it might be a nice way to abstract the packages, and provide some handy convenience methods to navigate through the packages, and track current status/position. I'll know more when I can play around with the live webservice connection to the Our Roots repository. Should know more on Monday.
One thing I realized today while playing around with some ideas for this technique, is that I seem to have a weird hybridized design strategy. I caught myself doing a LOT of design work on PAPER. Initial diagramming of the relationships between the classes, right down to the first draft of the interface for my controller class. Very odd... Probably because it's a more visceral approach, and easier to throw out a piece of paper than to delete a file (you trash paper, you save and even back up files...). Interesting. And I thought I was pretty paperless at this kind of thing. Far from it, actually. Kill the trees!