Best Way to Build a "Traditional" Website Structure Using Cocoon?

[David Swearingen <da...@yahoo.com>]

Newbie question:  I am designing a dynamic website and have chosen
Cocoon as the architecture.  The website will contain a 'classic'
structure, with left navigation, masthead, footer, and a body section
containing content.  The various elements, like the navigation,
surrounding the content will rarely change of course.  I will define
these in XML.  So there will be a leftnav.xml, masthead.xml,
footer.xml.  In a typical website like this the whole thing is in an
html table, and the top row of the table contains the masthead, a left
cell contains the navigation, the right cell contains the body text,
and the bottom row contains the footer.  Very straightforward, done all
the time.  I've built numerous sites like this with Struts and other
tools.

Now imagine the request comes for a page, like faq.html.  I know how to
make Cocoon grab faq.xml and run it through a XSL transformer to add
the html markup and then serialize it out.  Done this already.

But for my website I need to generate the entire table context for the
page, then insert the masthead html, then there's more html that closes
the table cell and opens a new one, generates the left navigation html
from leftnav.xml, closes the cell, spits out my content from faq.xml,
etc., you get the picture.

Ideally I want my page structure html -- the code that defines the
overall page table that holds all the elements -- in one file, and the
masthead, navigation and footer in their own files, and then of course
the content documents are in their respective xml files.  This makes
for easy site maintenance.

So what's the best way to do this in Cocoon?  It seems it could be
accomplished in numerous ways, but I have a feeling there's a
best-practice here.

Thanks,
David

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AW: Best Way to Build a "Traditional" Website Structure Using Cocoon?

[Marco Rolappe <m_...@web.de>]

hi david,

that approach reminds me of JSP templates
(http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2001/jw-1228-jsptemplate.html)...

and I'd realize that approach something like the following:

- define your template markup
    - including placeholders for sections/regions
- define an aggregation stylesheet
    - receives as parameters the URLs of the defined sections/regions
    - using the parameters, replaces the placeholders in the template with
tags for one of the include transformers
- have an include transformer aggregate the page


sitemap snippet would look like:

...
    <map:match pattern="*.xhtml">
        <map:generate src="template.xhtml"/>

        <map:transform src="template.xsl">
		<map:parameter name="header" value="cocoon:/header.xhtml.fragment"/>
		<map:parameter name="footer" value="cocoon:/footer.xhtml.fragment"/>
		<map:parameter name="content" value="cocoon:/{1}.xhtml.fragment"/>
        </map:transform>

        <map:transform type="cinclude"/>

        <map:serialize type="xhtml"/>
    </map:match>
...


and aggregation stylesheet:

...
<xsl:param name="content"/>

<xsl:template match="content">
	<ci:include .../>
</xsl:template>
...

> -----Ursprungliche Nachricht-----
> Von: users-return-65660-m_rolappe=web.de@cocoon.apache.org
> [mailto:users-return-65660-m_rolappe=web.de@cocoon.apache.org]Im Auftrag
> von David Swearingen
> Gesendet: Freitag, 9. April 2004 00:04
> An: users@cocoon.apache.org
> Betreff: Best Way to Build a "Traditional" Website Structure Using
> Cocoon?
>
>
> Newbie question:  I am designing a dynamic website and have chosen
> Cocoon as the architecture.  The website will contain a 'classic'
> structure, with left navigation, masthead, footer, and a body section
> containing content.  The various elements, like the navigation,
> surrounding the content will rarely change of course.  I will define
> these in XML.  So there will be a leftnav.xml, masthead.xml,
> footer.xml.  In a typical website like this the whole thing is in an
> html table, and the top row of the table contains the masthead, a left
> cell contains the navigation, the right cell contains the body text,
> and the bottom row contains the footer.  Very straightforward, done all
> the time.  I've built numerous sites like this with Struts and other
> tools.
>
> Now imagine the request comes for a page, like faq.html.  I know how to
> make Cocoon grab faq.xml and run it through a XSL transformer to add
> the html markup and then serialize it out.  Done this already.
>
> But for my website I need to generate the entire table context for the
> page, then insert the masthead html, then there's more html that closes
> the table cell and opens a new one, generates the left navigation html
> from leftnav.xml, closes the cell, spits out my content from faq.xml,
> etc., you get the picture.
>
> Ideally I want my page structure html -- the code that defines the
> overall page table that holds all the elements -- in one file, and the
> masthead, navigation and footer in their own files, and then of course
> the content documents are in their respective xml files.  This makes
> for easy site maintenance.
>
> So what's the best way to do this in Cocoon?  It seems it could be
> accomplished in numerous ways, but I have a feeling there's a
> best-practice here.
>
> Thanks,
> David
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/
>
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> To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@cocoon.apache.org
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