Best Practises

System

Hi All,

We are in the process of designing the new area of our website.
The new html pages for the site will be designed by web designers and templating will be taken up by us at later stage.

I would like to know what are the things important from templating perspective which site designers should remember while designing.

I would appreciate your views on this.

Also if you know about any documentation already written on this - please give me the links.

Thanks,
Ravindra

Migrateduser

So if I understand you correctly, you want to know what to consider while you're designing your new website for issues that matter to templating.

Well. That's a lot, actually, and more than I have tme to write about today. But here's a few things to consider, and maybe some other folks will chime in too.

- Templating is at its best for creating standardized pages that look the same but have different content. Thus, news releases, product descriptions, etc, can be generated quickly. But that means you should plan out in advance what are the standard parts of your pages, and what are the "changable" parts that get created fresh for each page.

- Templating can generate _any_ kind of output file, particulary text formatted ones such as html, jsp, asp, etc. The output file type _can_ contain code (such as JSP), but the generated code is meant for execution on the deployed server, not in TeamSite.

- Generating pages of content is simple with templating. Generating the _indexes_ to those pages is slightly harder, but not terribly difficult. IOW: each time you use templating to generate a new page on the website, you probably have to "touch" one or more other pages that should have a link to the new page. This job also can be done by templating, or it can be done dynamically on the production server with a JSP or ASP (or other) server-side program that automatically creates indexes for pages by looking them up in the file system or a database.

- You can and should determine which parts of your pages are shared content (banners, menus, etc) v wich parts are less common, and plan for creating component templates for the shared content. This will reduce maintenance time, since you can change a common component in one place, regenerate pages, and have the new version show up automatically in all affected locations.

- In your intrim website you can use SSI to include static pages; once you switch to templating you can replace most or all of your SSI (and cut down on server runtime loading) by converting SSI includes to iw_include directives in your PTs.

That's all for now--others?

bw


Bob Walden [bob.walden@interwoven.com]
Interwoven Education Group
IM: Yahoo, MSN bob_walden