Thanks for the clarification on ftl. I'm not really in the mood (don't have the time or budget) to blaze a new trail.
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 2:42:23 PM (GMT-0700) America/Denver Subject: Re: I am trying to display CMS mananaged content in ecommerce On Oct 9, 2007, at 2:10 PM, Vince M. Clark wrote: > 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. This is certainly possible in theory, but keep in mind that no one (as far as I know anyway!) has gone through and done that, so there are no examples and chances are some coding work would be required in the tools to make it reasonable (or possible...) to do. You can _certainly_ do it, but it will likely be a bit of a project. If you're looking for cut a new trail, then great, but if you're hoping to work more efficiently by following what others have done, you're not going to find a trail to follow. -David
