Different Look and Feel / Same content

We are running into a situation where our users want to use the content within a branch on multiple web instances. Each web instance will posess it's own look and feel and set of navigation files. All this is supposed to be transparent to the content contributor. Has anyone had any experience with this? Here are a few ideas we have been kicking around.

1) Custom deploy scripts which deploy same content to multiple places
2) Extended attribue which allows file to be submitted to different staging area

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Comments

Adam Stoller

This sounds like a great use of TeamSite Templating's presentation templates - or are you dealing with XML component pieces that you want to be able to mix-and-match for different end-uses? If so, then TeamXML may be beneficial to your efforts.

If you generate the pages into different directories (within TeamSite) for the different web instances, then you can use OpenDeploy to deploy just those directories - or use the filtering mechanism within OpenDeploy to choose specific directories to deploy to specific targets (actually, currently the filters are based on *exclusions* only - coming in the next release [beta in December I believe] you will be able to use *inclusion* filters too).

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)

Tob

So these directories will contain their own versions of includes/css's? What if I have hundreds of pages that are not Templates? It seems like creating a template for just this purpose is a big undertaking.

Thanks!

Adam Stoller

When you said each instance would have its own look-and-feel and navigation - I was thinking of static pages for which templating excels.

If you're using includes and css's - can you locate those files in distinct directories for the different web sites, but use the same filenames for each of them? If so - you could deploy them from their site-specific directory in TeamSite to their "generic" location on each of the web servers - and have all the references in the pages use the "generic" location.

You'd probably have to play around a bit with iwproxy configurations to get previewing within TeamSite to work, but I think that would work.

However - you might want to rethink the include/css process and look at using DCR/PTs since the former tends to require on-the-fly server processing and the latter doesn't - which tends to mean that you (and your sites' users) will get experience better performance over the long run. Something to consider anyway.

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)

Tob

Thanks fish!