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Posted to user@lenya.apache.org by "Mike M." <le...@mordent.com> on 2005/02/15 22:48:39 UTC
Can't figure out site architecture...
Hi,
I've been looking at Lenya for a week now and am having a very difficult time
figuring a lot of stuff out.
We're trying to re-implement some of our sites in Lenya. We have a number of
sites that all look the same but have some things different (like the home page
and some css styles).
Here's one example of a page on our site:
http://informit.mit.edu/ehs-ms/1.2prince.html
I'm having difficulty determining if we need new doctypes or not for some of the
parts of our site. In general, we have one page layout. On the left is the nav
(analogous to lenya's default site's left menu), but in addition there's a block
of "Related Links" below that nav that are just arbitrary links off to somewhere
else. In the middle is the body (just like Lenya's default site), but on the
right there's a set of "Also of Interest" links (below a search widget similar
to Lenya's).
What I can't figure out is how to make the "Related Links" and "Also of
Interest" boxes work; there's only one set of Related Links for the entire site,
but there's an Also of Interest set of links for each page. Should they be just
another XHTML file that people can edit? If so, how does that affect the
sitemap and how do we control which "Also" shows up with which page (we
obviously don't want that content showing up in the left nav menu)? Should they
be new doctypes?
Also, how should we structure our lenya setup? I'm guessing we should have each
site be its own pub, but then how do we share the xsl files? (I saw some
documentation on Publishing Templates, but that's only available in 1.4 and I
couldn't get 1.4 to work at all from one of the source snapshots or from svn;
lots of problems with editing, etc).
Thanks!
-Mike M.
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Re: Can't figure out site architecture...
Posted by Andreas Hartmann <an...@apache.org>.
Torsten Schlabach wrote:
> Mike,
>
> to answer your last question first:
>
> >> I'm guessing we should have each
> >> site be its own pub, but then how do we share the xsl files? (I saw
> >> some documentation on Publishing Templates, but that's only available
> >> in 1.4 and I couldn't get 1.4 to work at all from one of the source
> >> snapshots or from svn; lots of problems with editing, etc).
[...]
> Regarding sharing CSS and XSLT the publication templating you read about
> is indeed made exactly for that. But if you cannot use 1.4 - which I
> could understand - yet a very basic approach to sharing would be
> symlinks (if you are on a *ix system) or setting up a simple copy
> mechanism to distribute them from a central directory.
Yes, I recommend that too. The unicms publications (www.wyona.org) use
one "root" publication (unizh) to serve the XSLTs etc. There is another
publication (unitemplate) which is copied using a clone process
(Ant build file) to generate new publications.
This will be replaced with publication templating, but for 1.2 there
is no known superior solution.
> This is low tech
> but it works and can be replaced by publication templating once you find
> 1.4 stable enough. I think there are no plans to backport publication
> templating to 1.2. (Others might correct me.)
You are right, it is not planned because the impact on the code base
is too big.
BTW, I really like your explainations (also about the doctypes) :)
-- Andreas
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Re: Can't figure out site architecture...
Posted by Lee Carroll <le...@aol.com>.
Torsten
Thanks for the very full reply. I think I'm begining to understand when to
use doc types other than xhtml
Once again Thanks
Lee C
----- Original Message -----
From: "Torsten Schlabach" <ts...@apache.org>
To: "Lenya Users List" <us...@lenya.apache.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 2:34 PM
Subject: Re: Can't figure out site architecture...
> Lee,
>
> >> We have created several doc types. The usual news page , white paper
> , press release etc. But
> >> also a generalPage.
> >> A generalPage allows users to create a pretty easy going page with
> some freedom. xhtml
> >> seemed to varied , complex and well difficult for a user. In short
> we decided to create a doc
> >> type as a means of providing a template.........
>
> >> Whats considered best practice ?
>
> I'd say it heavily depends on
>
> - the type of website (predictability of content,
> - the team structure, i.e. your role als the Lenya guy on the team and the
> skills of the others.
>
> Let me give you two examples from my practice to illustrate the point:
>
> Project A: I have had a project where some people in an organisation were
> told that they should built a website. They had never done this before,
> they knew that HTML had something to to with web pages but they expected
> to edit the content as WYSIWYG as possible. Two addition factors were
> important: When the project started they did NOT have a clear of view of
> what should be on the site, how often the individual parts would need
> updating and the like. This was all supposed to evolve over time. And I
> was not a committed resource on that team but help out on a goodwill
> basis.
>
> The only way to make this project going was to stay with XHTML as the only
> doctype and Kupu as the editor of choice. It was too hard to explain to
> the team members that BXE does not work in IE. They kept trying ... and
> blaming ...
>
> That way, when they had a spontanous idea such as "I need a box on the
> right hand side" or "I want to put in a matrix of pictures here" they
> could do it without first having to ask me to provide a doctype and then
> wait for it to materialize.
>
> I still had the chance to try and structure the pages a bit afterwards.
> This is what the PageFragmentEditingProposal in the Wiki came from.
> Editing a complex page with a nested table layout as a whole in Kupu has
> proved a no-go with unexperienced users, and in my experience Kupu means
> unexperienced users.
>
> (I know some folks on the list will have strong feelings about this
> remarks, but when I want to give someone the 3-Minute-Evelator-Demo to
> Lenya to convince him or her to consider it, I log in as author on HIS
> PC - which means IE most of the time - go to sandbox page in some pub,
> call Kupu and ask the person to edit the page "as if this was Word". When
> I hit "Save" then and the changed page shows up with the site's CSS and
> navigation magically added I ussually have a deal! Others might have other
> exerience, bu this is mine. Side remark: The hardest part is to keep it
> that simple when the project moves on. We recently lost a customer due to
> problems further down the road.)
>
> So basically, this is supposed to be the "click on what you want to edit"
> metapher.
>
> Project B: If was known upfront that a site was supposed to be built which
> will display highly formalized information. (Historic financial data,
> comapany profiles, balance statements, etc.) where even existing and well
> know DTDs were to be used. We also knew that the structure of the data (as
> opposed to the presentation) was pretty static but we would need lots of
> ways to present the data through different channels with different levels
> of aggregatons and for different purposes - browsing in XHTML - printing
> in PDF - querying through WAP.
>
> This is where doctypes are the only answer to keeping the site content
> well structured and seaprated from presentation. Think of having hundreds
> of documents of type "company profile" and the presentation mode for
> company profiles is supposed to change. This when you want a single point
> of change: the xxx2xhtml.xsl stylesheet. And you can be sure you're done.
>
> Hope this sheds some light and help not to compare apples and pears.
>
> Again ... it depends ...
>
> Regards,
> Torsten
>
> Lee Carroll schrieb:
>
>> Hello Torsten,
>> (Sorry Mike M for the digression)
>>
>> Torsten Wrote (in words of fire)....
>> Now to the question of Doctypes. Please make sure you understand a
>> doctype is NOT a template mechanism! This is a common misconception that
>> I had when I was not to Lenya as well. I thought that if I have two
>> types of XHTML page, say "page with text and one picture" and "page with
>> three colums" I should set up a doctype for each of them. Well, you
>> could, but that's a separate story.
>>
>> You might want to have a look at
>> http://wiki.apache.org/lenya/AddingCustomDocType, especially at the
>> first paragraph. In short words: A doctype is about turning non-XHTML
>> into XHTML.
>>
>> This sounds very similiar to what I have done. Things look okay too, but
>> now I'm worried i've missed the point.
>>
>> We have created several doc types. The usual news page , white paper ,
>> press release etc. But also a generalPage.
>> A generalPage allows users to create a pretty easy going page with some
>> freedom. xhtml seemed to varied , complex and well difficult for a user.
>> In short we decided to create a doc type as a means of providing a
>> template.........
>>
>> Whats considered best practice ?
>>
>> Cheers Lee C
>>
>>
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>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscribe@lenya.apache.org
>> For additional commands, e-mail: user-help@lenya.apache.org
>>
>
>
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>
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Re: Can't figure out site architecture...
Posted by Torsten Schlabach <ts...@apache.org>.
Lee,
>> We have created several doc types. The usual news page , white paper
, press release etc. But
>> also a generalPage.
>> A generalPage allows users to create a pretty easy going page with
some freedom. xhtml
>> seemed to varied , complex and well difficult for a user. In short
we decided to create a doc
>> type as a means of providing a template.........
>> Whats considered best practice ?
I'd say it heavily depends on
- the type of website (predictability of content,
- the team structure, i.e. your role als the Lenya guy on the team and
the skills of the others.
Let me give you two examples from my practice to illustrate the point:
Project A: I have had a project where some people in an organisation
were told that they should built a website. They had never done this
before, they knew that HTML had something to to with web pages but they
expected to edit the content as WYSIWYG as possible. Two addition
factors were important: When the project started they did NOT have a
clear of view of what should be on the site, how often the individual
parts would need updating and the like. This was all supposed to evolve
over time. And I was not a committed resource on that team but help out
on a goodwill basis.
The only way to make this project going was to stay with XHTML as the
only doctype and Kupu as the editor of choice. It was too hard to
explain to the team members that BXE does not work in IE. They kept
trying ... and blaming ...
That way, when they had a spontanous idea such as "I need a box on the
right hand side" or "I want to put in a matrix of pictures here" they
could do it without first having to ask me to provide a doctype and then
wait for it to materialize.
I still had the chance to try and structure the pages a bit afterwards.
This is what the PageFragmentEditingProposal in the Wiki came from.
Editing a complex page with a nested table layout as a whole in Kupu has
proved a no-go with unexperienced users, and in my experience Kupu means
unexperienced users.
(I know some folks on the list will have strong feelings about this
remarks, but when I want to give someone the 3-Minute-Evelator-Demo to
Lenya to convince him or her to consider it, I log in as author on HIS
PC - which means IE most of the time - go to sandbox page in some pub,
call Kupu and ask the person to edit the page "as if this was Word".
When I hit "Save" then and the changed page shows up with the site's CSS
and navigation magically added I ussually have a deal! Others might have
other exerience, bu this is mine. Side remark: The hardest part is to
keep it that simple when the project moves on. We recently lost a
customer due to problems further down the road.)
So basically, this is supposed to be the "click on what you want to
edit" metapher.
Project B: If was known upfront that a site was supposed to be built
which will display highly formalized information. (Historic financial
data, comapany profiles, balance statements, etc.) where even existing
and well know DTDs were to be used. We also knew that the structure of
the data (as opposed to the presentation) was pretty static but we would
need lots of ways to present the data through different channels with
different levels of aggregatons and for different purposes - browsing in
XHTML - printing in PDF - querying through WAP.
This is where doctypes are the only answer to keeping the site content
well structured and seaprated from presentation. Think of having
hundreds of documents of type "company profile" and the presentation
mode for company profiles is supposed to change. This when you want a
single point of change: the xxx2xhtml.xsl stylesheet. And you can be
sure you're done.
Hope this sheds some light and help not to compare apples and pears.
Again ... it depends ...
Regards,
Torsten
Lee Carroll schrieb:
> Hello Torsten,
> (Sorry Mike M for the digression)
>
> Torsten Wrote (in words of fire)....
> Now to the question of Doctypes. Please make sure you understand a
> doctype is NOT a template mechanism! This is a common misconception that
> I had when I was not to Lenya as well. I thought that if I have two
> types of XHTML page, say "page with text and one picture" and "page with
> three colums" I should set up a doctype for each of them. Well, you
> could, but that's a separate story.
>
> You might want to have a look at
> http://wiki.apache.org/lenya/AddingCustomDocType, especially at the
> first paragraph. In short words: A doctype is about turning non-XHTML
> into XHTML.
>
> This sounds very similiar to what I have done. Things look okay too,
> but now I'm worried i've missed the point.
>
> We have created several doc types. The usual news page , white paper ,
> press release etc. But also a generalPage.
> A generalPage allows users to create a pretty easy going page with
> some freedom. xhtml seemed to varied , complex and well difficult for
> a user. In short we decided to create a doc type as a means of
> providing a template.........
>
> Whats considered best practice ?
>
> Cheers Lee C
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscribe@lenya.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: user-help@lenya.apache.org
>
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Re: Can't figure out site architecture...
Posted by Andreas Hartmann <an...@apache.org>.
Lee Carroll wrote:
> Hello Torsten,
> (Sorry Mike M for the digression)
>
> Torsten Wrote (in words of fire)....
> Now to the question of Doctypes. Please make sure you understand a
> doctype is NOT a template mechanism! This is a common misconception that
> I had when I was not to Lenya as well. I thought that if I have two
> types of XHTML page, say "page with text and one picture" and "page with
> three colums" I should set up a doctype for each of them. Well, you
> could, but that's a separate story.
>
> You might want to have a look at
> http://wiki.apache.org/lenya/AddingCustomDocType, especially at the
> first paragraph. In short words: A doctype is about turning non-XHTML
> into XHTML.
>
> This sounds very similiar to what I have done. Things look okay too, but
> now I'm worried i've missed the point.
>
> We have created several doc types. The usual news page , white paper ,
> press release etc. But also a generalPage.
> A generalPage allows users to create a pretty easy going page with some
> freedom. xhtml seemed to varied , complex and well difficult for a user.
> In short we decided to create a doc type as a means of providing a
> template.........
In my experience, XHTML Strict is not that bad for users who have
basic publishing experience. An advantage is the opportunity to import
existing HTML pages (using Tidy).
Another option is the Forrest document format, especially for
documentation.
-- Andreas
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Re: Can't figure out site architecture...
Posted by Lee Carroll <le...@aol.com>.
Hello Torsten,
(Sorry Mike M for the digression)
Torsten Wrote (in words of fire)....
Now to the question of Doctypes. Please make sure you understand a
doctype is NOT a template mechanism! This is a common misconception that
I had when I was not to Lenya as well. I thought that if I have two
types of XHTML page, say "page with text and one picture" and "page with
three colums" I should set up a doctype for each of them. Well, you
could, but that's a separate story.
You might want to have a look at
http://wiki.apache.org/lenya/AddingCustomDocType, especially at the
first paragraph. In short words: A doctype is about turning non-XHTML
into XHTML.
This sounds very similiar to what I have done. Things look okay too, but now
I'm worried i've missed the point.
We have created several doc types. The usual news page , white paper , press
release etc. But also a generalPage.
A generalPage allows users to create a pretty easy going page with some
freedom. xhtml seemed to varied , complex and well difficult for a user. In
short we decided to create a doc type as a means of providing a
template.........
Whats considered best practice ?
Cheers Lee C
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Re: Can't figure out site architecture...
Posted by Torsten Schlabach <ts...@apache.org>.
Mike,
to answer your last question first:
>> I'm guessing we should have each
>> site be its own pub, but then how do we share the xsl files? (I saw
>> some documentation on Publishing Templates, but that's only available
>> in 1.4 and I couldn't get 1.4 to work at all from one of the source
>> snapshots or from svn; lots of problems with editing, etc).
One publication per site will probably be a very good choice. Especially
if you have separate teams that edit each site this will be mandatory
as the editor's access rights are assigned on a per publication basis.
Also each site will have it's own navigation which then again related
to a publication having its own navigation.
Regarding sharing CSS and XSLT the publication templating you read about
is indeed made exactly for that. But if you cannot use 1.4 - which I
could understand - yet a very basic approach to sharing would be
symlinks (if you are on a *ix system) or setting up a simple copy
mechanism to distribute them from a central directory. This is low tech
but it works and can be replaced by publication templating once you find
1.4 stable enough. I think there are no plans to backport publication
templating to 1.2. (Others might correct me.)
Now to the question of Doctypes. Please make sure you understand a
doctype is NOT a template mechanism! This is a common misconception that
I had when I was not to Lenya as well. I thought that if I have two
types of XHTML page, say "page with text and one picture" and "page with
three colums" I should set up a doctype for each of them. Well, you
could, but that's a separate story.
You might want to have a look at
http://wiki.apache.org/lenya/AddingCustomDocType, especially at the
first paragraph. In short words: A doctype is about turning non-XHTML
into XHTML.
You could of course decide to have press release DTD and documents that
look like this:
<press-release>
<date>2005/2/15</date>
<headline>Lenya is a great tool</headline>
<sub-headline>More and more people decide to use it</sub-headline>
<text>Bla bla bla ...</text>
</press-release>
You need to decide yourself when this makes sense and when it doesn't.
This depends heavily on how formal your site editing is and what WYSIWYG
editors you intend to use. If you want to make sure that most content
can be editied with Kupu (which works in both IE and Mozilla) you are
pretty much restricted to XHTML.
Could you maybe take a look at
http://wiki.apache.org/lenya/PageFragmentEditingProposal
and let me know if this makes any sense to you?
This proposal has been lying around for quite some time and I had
received some comments that it is not clesr what this is about, but I
think it is exactly about what you are looking for.
Regards,
Torsten
Mike M. schrieb:
> Hi,
>
> I've been looking at Lenya for a week now and am having a very difficult time
> figuring a lot of stuff out.
>
> We're trying to re-implement some of our sites in Lenya. We have a number of
> sites that all look the same but have some things different (like the home page
> and some css styles).
>
> Here's one example of a page on our site:
> http://informit.mit.edu/ehs-ms/1.2prince.html
>
> I'm having difficulty determining if we need new doctypes or not for some of the
> parts of our site. In general, we have one page layout. On the left is the nav
> (analogous to lenya's default site's left menu), but in addition there's a block
> of "Related Links" below that nav that are just arbitrary links off to somewhere
> else. In the middle is the body (just like Lenya's default site), but on the
> right there's a set of "Also of Interest" links (below a search widget similar
> to Lenya's).
>
> What I can't figure out is how to make the "Related Links" and "Also of
> Interest" boxes work; there's only one set of Related Links for the entire site,
> but there's an Also of Interest set of links for each page. Should they be just
> another XHTML file that people can edit? If so, how does that affect the
> sitemap and how do we control which "Also" shows up with which page (we
> obviously don't want that content showing up in the left nav menu)? Should they
> be new doctypes?
>
> Also, how should we structure our lenya setup? I'm guessing we should have each
> site be its own pub, but then how do we share the xsl files? (I saw some
> documentation on Publishing Templates, but that's only available in 1.4 and I
> couldn't get 1.4 to work at all from one of the source snapshots or from svn;
> lots of problems with editing, etc).
>
> Thanks!
> -Mike M.
>
>
>
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> For additional commands, e-mail: user-help@lenya.apache.org
>
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Re: Can't figure out site architecture...
Posted by "Mike M." <le...@mordent.com>.
Thanks to all who answered! I'm going to look more at the uni zurich site.
Also, the fragment editing idea is a great idea. Has this been implemented in
any way? Or is it just a theory?
Thanks,
-mm
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Re: Can't figure out site architecture...
Posted by "Gregor J. Rothfuss" <gr...@apache.org>.
Mike M. wrote:
> What I can't figure out is how to make the "Related Links" and "Also of
> Interest" boxes work; there's only one set of Related Links for the entire site,
> but there's an Also of Interest set of links for each page. Should they be just
> another XHTML file that people can edit? If so, how does that affect the
> sitemap and how do we control which "Also" shows up with which page (we
> obviously don't want that content showing up in the left nav menu)? Should they
> be new doctypes?
take a look at the university of zurich publication, which has features
like that. they started out with xhtml and enriched it with related
links tags (and also an attribute at the root to determine 1,2 or 3
column layout)
http://wyona.org
> Also, how should we structure our lenya setup? I'm guessing we should have each
> site be its own pub, but then how do we share the xsl files? (I saw some
> documentation on Publishing Templates, but that's only available in 1.4 and I
> couldn't get 1.4 to work at all from one of the source snapshots or from svn;
> lots of problems with editing, etc).
has been answered by others ;)
--
Gregor J. Rothfuss
COO, Wyona Content Management Solutions http://wyona.com
Apache Lenya http://lenya.apache.org
gregor.rothfuss@wyona.com gregor@apache.org
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