Hello,
Forgive me for my ignorance, but I was just introduced to TeamSite, LiveSite, and Interwoven's other tools earlier today.
I have several years experience in web development. Specifically, my expertise is in markup languages and stylesheets (XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML, XSLT, etc.), browser compatibility, and server side software like Apache, PHP, and MySQL.
With that said, I've been studying the structuring methods available for building a site in Interwoven's tools. I'm trying to understand the best approach to use for building out our site. We have already gone through the design process and we currently have a series of static HTML files that need to be broken apart into templates and components within LiveSite. This is the part I'm struggling with.
I'm finding that the layout techniques available to me through LiveSite are less than ideal, and that I'm unable to create a page type / template / component structure that satisfies my needs. In a perfect world, I'd like to create a global page layout that defines regions where components or templates can be placed. When a business user creates a new page, it already has the proper navigation components, branding, etc. and only allows them to add additional components / templates within defined regions. That way page structure is maintained in a single location. If, for example, I want to make the right column 50 pixels wider across the entire site, I simply adjust the styles in a global CSS file.
The default method of just plopping components onto the layout grid makes it very difficult to create a CSS based layout. For example, consider the following XHTML page:
[html]
Page Title Here
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-US" />
<meta name="description" content="" lang="en-US" />
<meta name="language" content="en-US" lang="en-US" />
<meta name="robots" content="all" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/jquery-1.2.6.pack.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/global.js"></script>
[/html]
This is a fairly straight forward CSS based layout, yet replicating this in LiveSite seems more difficult than it should. Unless I'm incorrect, I've discovered the following limitations:
Think of the boxes that can be dragged and dropped as components or templates on a page. You can move them around the page, but only within predefined regions. The page markup still remains clean, because the only thing that is changing is the source order of the draggable elements. The layout of the site is still entirely dictated by the page's CSS file. Now whether or not a similar interface is available within LiveSite is not a concern. It is the theory that is important to me, and the distinct separation of presentation and layout.Such a templating system seems common place in various CMS solutions I've used in the past, yet I'm unable to create a structure in LiveSite that satisfies our needs.Can anyone make any suggestions as to what I'm missing here? Again, I apologize if I'm missing something very obvious, but from what I've gathered about the tool, it is not as clear cut as one would hope...Thank you,Caleb D.
