[thelist] Enterprise site architecture/CMS question

Diane Soini dianesoini at earthlink.net
Wed Nov 12 22:02:18 CST 2003


On Wednesday, November 12, 2003, at 06:25 AM, 
thelist-request at lists.evolt.org wrote:

>
>> Wondering about your opinions on how to handle static content on a
>> large enterprise size site.
>
> Hi Tom,
>
> One efficient way to handle static content is to write content pages 
> that
> call the template - somewhat upsidedown as logic goes.

I have used this method. I didn't have quite so many pages as a large 
enterprise would, but it is indeed an efficient way to handle static 
content and make it easy to redesign.

They way it works is to have some templates that take the body content 
file's filename as a variable. Then the page itself passes that 
variable to the template. The body content file is yet another file.

If the body content file uses really simple HTML, then it's a relative 
cinch to do a web site redesign. By simple HTML I mean that instead of 
doing <b class="whatever"> or <font face=blah blah blah> or tons of 
nested tables kind of stuff you keep it very simple. <h1> tags for 
headings, <p> tags for paragraphs, <ul><li> for lists, maybe some 
custom classes for things like images with captions or callout boxes 
etc. Style the look of those things in the stylesheet. Push all the 
look and feel you can into the stylesheet. Avoid inline styles, or any 
kind of inline presentational markup like the plague.

Then when it's time for the redesign, you redesign the look of the html 
tags in the stylesheet and redesign the layout of the site pages in the 
templates. All those body content pages you don't have to touch.

Of course it's never exactly that easy, and this example is somewhat 
simplified. Basically, you get to avoid re-doing most of the content 
pages in the next redesign. The trade-off is that it's not intuitive 
for most people when they want to edit the content to have to look in a 
file that isn't the same name as the one their browser calls.

Diane



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