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Templates within Templates

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phej

Technical User
Feb 8, 2005
22
US
Hopefully this hasn't been covered anywhere, I searched but came up empty.

I'm working on a site build out and have come across an interesting quandry. The site's structure is the same throughout the site with the middle column being used for the main content area.

Their content for this area calls for many different content types (a 1 column layout, a 2 column layout with and without a subhead, a data table, a mixed 1 and 2 column layout, etc.) and I want to offer them as much flexibility as possible. So I'm trying to come up with a way to have Library items for each content type that could add to any page and then edit (detach) to add content specific to that page. I'm not trying to streamline content - I'm doing that with SSI's - I'm just trying to give them an easy way to to add different content to their pages.

The trick is that they're going to be doing this in Contribute and they're not that computer-savvy anyway. So I thought that if we had a set of Library Items (like a database) of different content types that they can pull from and plug in where they want that that would be the best solution. And because they don't know code and are updating this with Contribute, it'd be awesome if I could get repeating regions working so that to add a new data row or new news item li, they could just hit the + button and add one. With a system like that I can also control the display with styles a lot more easily, but that's beside the point. What I'm trying to avoid is creating a template for each of the options available with the # of content types they have.

Does that make sense?

Thanks in advance for any help!
 
I would be tempted just to create a new db table for each template that way you can then have insert pages based on each template. That way you can specify how each page is laid out.

Cheech

[Peace][Pipe]
 
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