David - You didn't say it, BJ did. "...moving away from ftl as time permits."
I understand your point about versioning and in general I agree.
My primary objective right now is to understand how the pieces fit together
well enough to come to an educated conclusion.
So let's start with a real example. We could use the cmssite as a starting
point. It follows your recommendation of the "template" being ftl files on the
filesystem. It contains:
In cmssite/template/cms:
MainDecorator.ftl
HtmlHead.ftl
In cmssite/webapp/cmssite:
DemoFooter.ftl
DemoHeader.ftl
DemoHome.ftl
In this example the MainDecorator.ftl references content:
<body>
${(thisContent.subcontent.header)?if_exists}
${decoratedContent}
${(thisContent.subcontent.footer)?if_exists}
</body>
To define the website in the CMS everything starts with the Publish Point,
which indirectly ties to the MainDecorator.ftl file. So as far as I can tell
MainDecorator.ftl is basically the starting point of this website and controls
how content is rendered.
If we were to expand upon this example and the MainDecorator.ftl is starting
point of a new site how would one "plug in" or reference functionality (and
possibly screens) from other components, ecommerece or otherwise?
I think where I am getting confused is that if you render content via CMS you
are already past the point of having access to lower level functionality such
as screen widgets and the controller.xml file.
Probably not articulated very well but I am still coming up to speed on how
everything ultimately results in a rendered UI that does something.
Vince Clark
Global Era
The Freedom of Open Source
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(303) 493-6723
----- Original Message -----
From: "David E Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, October 9, 2007 11:54:09 AM (GMT-0700) America/Denver
Subject: Re: I am trying to display CMS mananaged content in ecommerce
On Oct 9, 2007, at 11:38 AM, Vince M. Clark wrote:
> OfBiz is moving away from ftl? What is it moving to?
Did I say that? No. Did I phrase things to make it clear that the
pattern of using templates for ecommerce is larger and longer lasting
than even FTL? Yes.
> IMHO your position on eCommerce limits the value of a built in CMS.
> With the current CMS functionality it is possible to build and
> maintain a site almost exclusively thru content records and
> associations, starting with the publish point. Only a skeleton
> directory structure is necessary in the deployment.
>
> It seems reasonable to suggest adding other functionality to a
> content managed site including eCommerce functionality.
You could certainly do something like this. I don't think it will
ever be the default for OFBiz though. The main reason is that version
control of code for reliable rollouts of a tested set of code is
vital for most sites (unless their tolerance for errors and bugs is
very high). You can use revision control in the content management,
but that still doesn't solve the problem because there is no reliable
way to coordinate code-in-content revisions with revisions of code in
the code repository (SVN or the like).
The more common approach is to have the templates in general in the
file system using current methods, and put managed content about
products, policies, etc, etc in the content management system.
-David
