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Looking for business examples of Templating

System

Hi Devnet Templaters -

We've worked with TeamSite, OpenDeploy for a good while now, and more recently MetaTagger, but we haven't done almost any templating work. We've been wrapping workflow around some Dreamweaver templated sites and this is working great but we're not realizing any content reuse.

I've buckled down and done some basic learning on templating lately, working through a tutorial, looking at the supplied examples and getting the Visual Template Builder to work pretty well for me. I even got a TeamSite presentation template wrapped inside one of our Dreamweaver templates.

And here's the general question I'd like to present:
Could some of you give some real life examples of how you've used templating in your businesses? This'd really help us out in being able to better recognize opportunities for templating at our company.

Thanks all,
Wally Box
Nike, Inc.

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MattP

For me, this is the greatest value in content management. Here are some of the benefits we see:

Don't need to maintain desktop applications (purchase, upgrade, support, etc)
Able to maintain a consistent look and feel
Able to maintain coding standards
Able to rein in the people that *think* they are good designers
Non-technical business users can contribute content without having to lean an html app of the month
Content can be easily multi-purposed (multiple presentation templates for printing, email etc)
Easy to do across the board updates
great separation of presentation from content (be careful with VFE)
Some OK logic with TPLs

Some of these benefits you can see with DW templates, but not all. Please feel free to contact me directly if you would like to discuss further.

Matt

Matthew Petitjean
BOC Group
Murray Hill, NJ 07974 USA

tvaughan

We were managing content in TeamSite for about 12 months before we took a serious look at site-wide templating.

In our initial rollout, we had a couple templates for specific pages like press releases and SEC filings, etc. but nothing you could really justify with ROI. Last fall, we did a complete redesign of our site and decided that global templates were the best way to go-- this change was completely transparent to the end user, though it double the number of files we had.

To adopt templates everywhere on a large, non-templated site, we walked through all our files with a script that guessed where the "body" of the page existed within our HTML files and cut out the body content and saved it in separate _body files. In the original page, we replaced the hole where the content used to be with a server side include pointing to the new _body file.

Then we created a DCT that captures all the major components of our redesigned look and feel-- title, brand, meta comments, leftnav category, usage tracking category, print-this-page icon, etc.

Then, with a pretty robust set of perl scripts, we made a pass over all of the non-body files and parsed out the bits of data we were interested in and saved them into DCR files-- one for each page on our site.

Once we had all the DCRs, all we had to do was create a template in our new look & feel and run a big **** generation process to produce our new site. It worked like a charm.

The real beauty of it now is that we can strictly control branding images, left navigation compliance, footer links, etc. while continuing to allow the business areas to do pretty much whatever the want to their _body files. The next time there's a redesign, it'll take us no time at all. . . or if we decide we want to rollout some new page feature (like breadcrumbs), we can change the template, regenerate our whole site and presto!

Tom

Migrateduser

Great info! So, now do you have a single DCT that is used to make changes to any page on your site?

Wally

tvaughan

By and large, yes. We have a DCTs of type "global/page" for your generic header-leftnav-body-footer pages and a DCT for type "global/popup" which controls our branded popup pages.

Some of our pages use a specific template for a specific purpose. For example, even though our news releases are displayed with a generic header-leftnav-body-footer format, they have a separate "news/archives" DCT because we wanted to capture additional information that we use to auto-generate our news index and archive index pages.

Just guessing here, but I bet that 85% of our pages are of type "global/page", 5% are of type "global/popup" and 10% are of type "news/archive". . . the key win from our effort is that 100% are based on DCRs.

Tom