TeamSite best practices for web content

Hello All-

Is there a best practices document for TeamSite that covers the web content to be managed in TeamSite? I am wondering about things like not having spaces or underscores in file names, not using "dot dot slash" in href tags, etc. Any info, suggestions, flames, et al much appreciated.

-Nathan
WA DIS

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chuckles

I don't think Interwoven would necessarily be the authority on something like that. One of TeamSite's big strengths is that it is very platform agnostice thanks to OpenDeploy. You need to worry more about your target environment.

In general, relative paths can be a maintainence nightmare, so absolute paths are the way to go. TeamSite doesn't care if your files have spaces in the names and neither do most web browsers, but they will replace the spaces with %20. What other kind of info are you looking for?

NathansDIS

Thanks chuckles. I am looking for things related to file naming conventions, relative vs. absolute paths, case sensitive file names, hyphens and underscores, and just general web publishing guidelines to pass on to a customer. Things that will make their move into TeamSite less painful.

FYI, we are on win2k TS 6.1/6.5 and publish to IIS 5.0/6.0/SunOne web servers.

-n

IWguy

Good question NathanDIS !

My clients have been asking if such a document exists so if you hear of anything, a follow-up post would be most welcome.

Thanks,
D

Adam Stoller

I'm not sure if any document exists as such - but perhaps we could use this thread to build one - starting with things you've mentioned already:

Avoid directory paths and filenames with white-space characters (e.g.: space, tab, linefeed, etc) in them
- It is possible to code around such things, but it frequently causes havoc when you are using bits and pieces of code from multiple sources and some of them do, and some of them do not take this into consideration.
Avoid directory paths and filenames with potentially interperable punctuation characters in them
- &, <, and > can mess up XML parsers
- $, #, and * can cause issues with shell and/or regex processing
- ", and ' can cause issues with trying to escape- or quote- quotes
- etc. (note: I believe underscores '_' and hyphens '-' are generally okay to have in paths and filenames)
On Windows, avoid using things like ".com", ".bat", ".exe", etc in directory names (including branch and workarea names) as they sometimes seem to get interpreted as if they were executable files rather than directories.
Try to avoid using absolute paths as much as possible. Relative paths (../../) are usually preferable; symbolic paths (/images) are usually even more preferable as they can usually be mapped via proxies and it makes it significantly easier if those actual paths ever change to accomodate the change without having to edit every single piece of content.

How's that for starters?

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

rpollock

This is a nice start, but it would be nice to have an OFFICIAL document. Not all environments/organizations like the undocumented, I found it on a newsgroup, type of best practices.

Has anyone had luck finding one?

gzevin

I doubt that I ever saw anything like that been produced by Interwoven... I guess this is waht you call an 'oficial' document?

Greg Zevin, Ph.D. Comp. Sc.
Independent Interwoven Consultant/Architect
Sydney, AU