FC7 CMS Plugin

[Chris Kent]

Looking through Farcry V7 RC and Chelsea Boots, I see 2 content types - dmEventListing and dmNewsListing in the FarCry cms plugin - these appear to be very simple types available in the site tree that allow adding news or events listing pages.

In the past I would place a news/event listing rule within a container on the required page and these content types have very similar properties to the news/event publishing rules.

What is the reason behind using these content types in preference to publishing rules.

If you have many different content types within your project, this new approach could lead to more options that editors have within the site tree maintenance when usually a very high percentage of site tree content pages will be html pages

e.g.

- old way, when adding content under a nav node there would usually be options to select html page, includes/webskins or links

- FarCry 7 cms plugin adds 3 more options ( and more if this approach is used for new project specific content types

The main benefit that I can see is that more of the site set up is within the webtop and not on the front end.

Chris.

[Geoff Bowers]

Hi Chris,

Containers (and rules) are expensive in terms of performance.  They are also difficult for many non-technical clients to manage.

Having a dedicated content type in the tree for managing the listing has the following benefits:

- anecdotally easier for contributors to understand

- much better performance than an HTML page with multiple containers

- great deal of flexibility in terms of how the page is rendered; ie. the content type can have its own dedicated page level templates for rendering

For simple content listings of a single content type the benefits are less pronounced.  However, if you had a "landing page" content type that combined multiple content types together, and provided a variety of theme specific design options the benefits start to become very obvious.  For example, its not uncommon for folks to build home pages with several grid changes (column/row variations) and defining many container regions to provide configuration options for changing the behaviour of the landing page. A simple example of this is the "Landing Page" content type in the Chelsea sample project -- it provides easy management of carousel and promos without a single container. 

Its worth nothing that this is not a change in framework functionality, just in the approach that we use internally for projects.  We now offer examples of both approaches (containers and dedicated in tree content listing types) in the FarCry CMS plugin and sample application.

Hope that helps,

GB

[AJ Mercer]

sounds like a good topic for a hangout ;-)

--
You received this message cos you are subscribed to "farcry-dev" Google group.
To post, email: farcr...@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe, email: farcry-dev+...@googlegroups.com
For more options: http://groups.google.com/group/farcry-dev
--------------------------------
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/farcry
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "farcry-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to farcry-dev+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--

AJ Mercer
<webonix:net strength="Industrial" /> | <webonix:org community="Open" />
http://twitter.com/webonix

Railo Community Manager

[Jeff Coughlin]

Geoff,

How do you handle forms? We have clients with many many forms. We use
rules to place them on pages (and offer lots of config options in the
rules). To make it less confusing when choosing a form rule, we use
lRules to limit the option dynamically to rules that are relevant to
the page/content area.

I remember you saying recently that you don't like using rules for
forms. What approach do you use?

Jeff

[Justin Carter]

It depends on your app and it depends on your users ability to use the system. We added the simple listing types because it's an easy and obvious way to configure landing pages from within the tree. For more flexible requirements, or larger apps, or users who want/need more control over their content, rules are just fine too :)

Rules are in no way obsolete or considered the "old way", in fact I still want to improve them (maybe 7.1!)

[Chris Kent]

Thanks Geoff and Justin, 

Always good to hear new perspectives on approaches to FarCry projects.

Chris.