I recently received an email from one of our content manager clients whom I would describe as a "Power User". They are very in-tune with the Contensive ACMS tools and try to take full advantage of the system. She wrote that she had recently seen a video demonstration on a portal product that had a "nifty" feature that she thought we may want to include in Contensive.
The feature was to allow users the ability via a button click or through their profile form to create their own custom navigation within the portal to pages that were of interest to them.
The thing that struck me was that we built in that capability for the ACMS back in 2004, only we took it a step farther. Users could associate themselves to content for custom navigation creation, but the system could also add to your navigation based on "learning" what it is you actually do on the site. So, if a user was to visit a particular "Council Information" page a certain number of times within a given month, the system would automatically add a shortcut to that content for you.
The problem was back when we first introduced this feature most users weren't familiar enough with the concept of a CMS much less the relational database in the back-end that could store and build content profiles based on user habits. Needless to say the feature died a slow death. It was the old adage "...running around with a wheelbarrow full of dirt looking for a hole to fill".
Well since receiving that email we finally found the hole...now, if we can just find that wheelbarrow full of dirt.
