Peter,
I may have missed some other answers to this, but wanted to chirp in on at
least the general concept.
We have been working for some time with this general idea -- creating page
template objects that control what appears on the page instead of using
containers. Actually, I think the way we've implemented page template
objects is very similar to the current implementation of containers but iat
a higher level (the page level rather than the section of a page). (I
avoided containers at 1.01 because of concerns about performance and the
lack of programmatic access to them which is part of what brought us to page
template objects. I know these things have been addressed in 1.5 but haven't
used them on production sites yet.)
There's a lot to be said about page templates as an approach -- we've
built/are building several sites using it and it has been very cool to work
with.
We actually combined the idea of a page template with an optimized hierarchy
storage mechanism (not a Spectra hierarchy) to make processing and
manipulation very fast.
One of the immediate results is that almost every page on the site is
virtual -- no need to add any file-system template to create a new page. The
"pages" users see are generated by combining the entry in the page hierarchy
with a page template object that controls what appears on the page. This has
the interesting effect of making most of the site process through one
physical template.
Using this approach and building the code that displays objects on the page
definitely makes you appreciate Spectra's object-based approach -- you don't
have to know or care what you're displaying as long as all Types have their
own Display method.
Speed has also been pretty good even without caching, but caching is easy to
implement at a high level.
There's also other admin benefits -- making "pages" virtual allows you to do
things like move entire sections of a site from one area to another with an
admin tool since the page hierarchy is all contained in the database --
there are no file system files that have to be moved around. Or, you can
allow appropriately permissioned users to create "pages" programmatically
and then assign pre-defined looks to them.
BTW, although I haven't tested it yet, I don't see any reason why this
approach couldn't be combined with containers -- I'm just waiting for the
right opportunity to try this.
In any case, just wanted to let you know that there are some cools things
that can be done with this approach!
David Aden
Webworld Studios, Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Alexandrou [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 2:57 AM
To: Spectra-Talk
Subject: Page Templates vs. Objects
Hi guys,
Instead of using page templates I was thinking of having content types
that function like templates. Like SingleColumnPage and ThreeColumnPage
content types. A user would create a new object of one of these types and
then specify what section of the site it belongs to by assigning the
object to a metadata category. The metadata categories will mirror the
Site Layout Model in a way. You following me? :-)
Anyway, this solution should work fine in theory and would be much more
efficient rather than having to create physical pages from templates all
the time which I don't like. My question is what do you think would be
the best way to control the order in which the objects (pages really) sit
in their categories. Would you recommend a simple property as part of the
content type called order where a number is entered to denote the order in
which the object sits in its assigned category/section? If you know of a
better and more intuitive approach to this please let me know.
And finally, if you see this approach as being bad please advise. What
advantage would using page templates provide in this case?
Many thanks,
Peter Alexandrou
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