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Support for Tag libraries

nithinbose

Hi All,

We have an unusual requirement to enable business users to change "Interactive pages" on our site supported by TS 5.5.2.
This means that the business users using a template should be able to completely change the layout, content and move around a few JSP tags around the page.

We were looking towards using VisualFormat editor to drop down a list of JSP tags available for that template and perform some validation on the page.

Does anyone have any experience in doing anything similar? How easy is it to customize the VF editor and sub menus to capture additional attributes for elements such as tags.

Any comments and ideas are appreciated.

Thanks,
Nithin

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Comments

Sri

Hi,

>This means that the business users using a template should be able to completely change the layout, content and move around a few JSP tags around the page.

Isn't it Templating about separating presentation that is layout from content? Datacapture Templates are normally used for creating templates for data. Presentation templates are used for creating layout templates. Am I right in thinking that your intention is to have all this accomplished through just datacapture template by a single user? Is there any reason why you can not divide content and layout creation and assign it to different users?

Sri

Adam Stoller

I kind of agree with Sri. However, if there are a set of controlled layout structures for a given type of content, you *could* provide layout-directive fields in the DCR (with default values) that your PT could then use to determine how to present the content. For example you could have a series of radio buttons for things like: "Picture: Left-Top", "Picture: Right-Top", etc., and then have your PT use that information to determine where to place the <img> tag in the generated page.

Keep in mind, however, that while doing something like this to enable flexibility for the end-user will probably dramatically increase the complexity of your PTs - and I would recommend taking a more programmatic (e.g. Perl subroutines) approach to constructing your PTs rather than trying to do it all with the XML-style.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

nithinbose

Thanks for your inputs Sri and Fish.

We are basically looking at something like a WYSIWYG Presentation Template Editor. As an example, we intend the end users to have some interface, through which they will dicrate that the "login" fields need to appear at this precise point in the layout of the page and "my profile" information needs to appear somewhere else. So they are modifying both the content of the page and determining layout of the page components.

The reason of "merging" the content and presentation is if we use DCTs to capture only content and then use the PTs to place the page components gives the user limited predetermined choices for placements of each of the component.

Please let me know your ideas, if there is a different approach to solve the same problem

Thanks,
Nithin

Adam Stoller

It sounds like your customer isn't looking for consistancy on their site - which is somewhat in opposition to what templating is trying to provide.

There is a DreamWeaver plugin that supposedly makes it easier for non-technical people to design DCTs and/or PTs (haven't used it myself - but there have been a couple of threads regarding it recently - and the person who is using it seems to like it) -- however -- there is still a general separation of content creation (filling in the DCTs to create DCRs) and page layout (processing the DCRs with PTs to generate HTML [or similar]) - the idea being that if you want to change the way your site looks - you do it on a more global level via the PTs - not requiring any of the content to be changed.

If you mix too much of the presentation aspects into the content / data layer - then if you decide to change something later you need to muck with all the DCRs as well as the PTs - significantly increasing maintenance costs and generally decreasing web site consistancy.

Perhaps you need to talk with your customer a bit more and make sure you understand what they want -- and that they understand what they get and/or lose by your giving it to them...

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com