Previously I blogged about adding parent / child functionality to MIX Item Store. Since then I have been doing a lot of work researching how to implement feed contracts, for example like a Twitter feed or a subreddit.

It occurred to me that the existing parent / child functionality can be used for this purpose. The feed itself is just a content item. Adding an item to the feed is simply creating an item with the parent set to the feed item.

This raised another question — is it ever necessary for an item to have multiple parents? One very important use-case is retweeting or quoting. Such an item needs two parents — the feed that it should appear in, and the item that is being retweeted / quoted.

Therefore I have added multiple parent support to MIX Item Store.