ezpublish site design methods.

Author Message

Daniel Guerrier

Monday 28 March 2005 8:35:01 am

There seems to be two options when creating a site using ezp.

The first would be to rely solely on template overrides but that means you are locked into to basic look and feel of default skins if you don't feel like creating a new one.

The second is to create a bunch of templates that extract data and include them where needed.

Is there a happy medium or is this totally of base?

Jonathan Dillon-Hayes

Monday 28 March 2005 12:07:44 pm

Heya:

I'm not really sure how those are different.

At it's core, whenever you're working with a OO framework, you have to have a method to express your data that's generated by your classes into something your users can use.

Whether you're building eZ Publish or your own handbuilt CMS, you're always going to have to do this.

The second method your describing is more proceedural progamming (essentially using ez as a basic database). It's not really taking advantage of the power of eZ Publish, not it's OO underpinnings.

If you just want to get a default style and customize it, get one of the pre-designed results of the recent template contest:
http://ez.no/community/contribs/site_styles

Otherwise, yes, you do have to set up templates to express the data. Actually, eZ Publish is really intelligently build with the "overrrides", because it provides profound flexibility.

You got to remember, this system is design to build a system that scales well, and is less work in the big picture. Some modicum of effort is required to set it up initially.

Jonathan

---------
FireBright provides advanced eZ deployment with root access
http://www.FireBright.com/

Frey Staso

Tuesday 29 March 2005 8:26:38 am

Actually its not really that hard once you play with it. You can customize the overrides to fit your own needs quite easily. Each .tpl override is more or less just html code, just make sure you have a loop to display the object you are viewing (like a folder) and or the objects underneath where you are viewing (like an article)

If you follow along with the chess tutorial you'll see its pretty easy as long as you remember that each override goes inside of the pagelayout.tpl.

while these DO override the "standard" look and feel of ezpublish, the name is a little misleading. Really you are making a small tpl (basically html) file to display your data, don't really think about it "overriding" anything.

Open some of the overrides inside of dreamweaver or your favorite editor and try making small changes. Youll quickly see how this CMS can be used.

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