Meta Tags and Template questions

rsingh

Hello,

We use TeamSite 6 at our office. One of our internal clients has asked a couple questions that I am not sure of the answers (I'm still fairly new to TS). Can anyone help out? Here are his questions:

1. Can we gain access to specific content through the use of metatags in the Interwoven database? I.e., can we select defferent articles from the database based on the value of certain tags in the metadata for those articles.

2. Does Interwoven support the use of templates for different types of content? Can the templates be written once, then used many times? If a template is changed, does that change all occurrences of that template in the site?

I think for #2 - you can specify whatever output you want based on the presentation template, correct?

Thanks

Tom

ISCBorisB

Ok, few TS basics...

1. IW TS is (usually) not an active rendition mechanism like Application Servers.
What it means is that TS generated assets are ultimately Deployed to your site (Web Servers,
Web Farms and whatnot). After that TS job is done, actual rendition is up to your Web servers.

Therefore:
1.1. By "gain access to specific content" you meant your Site search engines or something of that nature.
Yes, you can "Deploy" MD as well to accomodate your search. What and how to do
depends on what your search engine requires, like for example BIF / BDF Files and/or index
rebuilding for Verity. If your search engine is DB driven, you can use IW DataDeploy to populate
target Tables and so on...

1.2. By "gain access to specific content" you meant TS Users (Content Contributors ?) search by MD related criteria
to find desired DCRs for example. If so, you can do that as well, you'd have to buy / install / configure TS search server.
it is perhaps not the best search engine on the planet but it's Ok and fine tuned for TS architecture.

2. The question shows fundamental understanding problem. TS basically gives you two abstraction layers:
Category and Type. Each type has it's own Data Capture template(DCT) and any number of Presentation Templates
Both DCTs and Pts are written once and used to deliver Content of this type. Using DCT your Content Contributors
build any number of Data Capture Records (DCRs). For example, let's say you have a Category "News" and Type "News Article".
You prepare one DCT and and two PTs, oh say "Highlight" and "Article". Upon creating 'Article1" DCR,
your Content Contributor can generate FROM THE SAME DCR a highlight for index Page and full
blown article linked from that index. Tomorrow he'll do the same for Article2, article3 and so on...

DCT changing issues may be tricky. It should be clear from above that DCRs are for
lack of better term "Populated DCTs". If you change DCT, certain related DCRs modifications
may or may not be required, that depends on nature of your change. You'll need much
better grasp of TS to discuss details on that topic

Hope that helps