Wednesday 26 May 2004 1:13:43 pm

Well, I'll give it a try...

In my opinion a clear understanding of siteaccess is fundamental to an understanding of designs. A very simplified explanation could be:
- A site contains of one database. The shop-site uses the shop-database, news uses news-database etc.
- The database contains (among other things) the content
- Often you want to approach the content in different ways according to what you want to do. ex: If you want to administrate the site you want to give different permissions to the content than you will give to the reader.
The eZ-way to do this is to set up two different siteaccesses to the same site/database. You can have as many siteaccesses to the same site as you like. (And you can have as many sites as you like too...)

So where does the design comes in?
For each siteaccess you define which design to use. The designs available are found in the first level under /design/.
The standard-design is rarely used as the main-desing in a siteaccess. Insted its used as a "fall-back-design". In your example the shop-site use the shop-design. But when the system fails to find the desired template in /design/shop/ it searches in /design/standard/. The standard-design therefore contains general templates aimed to serve every kind of request.
Yes, the standard-design also contains many templates aimed to the admin-interface ("every kind of requests..")

In this way you can easily make a new siteaccess and a new design to the same site, or you can use the same design to several different sites. If you install more than one of the example-sites (shop, blog, news etc) they all use the same admin-design. But the user see the sites in different ways because they see an other siteaccess which make use of an other design.

Hope it helps.
I've not tested 3.4beta and is new to the base-dir. Sorry.

The dirs under /design/ spesifies a way to