An Introduction to eZ Publish Concepts
Tuesday 22 May 2007 1:00:00 am
One of the keys to building a site that can be easily managed and maintained is ensuring that the system clearly separates data from presentation. The separation of content and design provides the following benefits:
- Content editors and designers can work separately without conflicts.
- Content can be published easily in multiple formats.
- Content can easily be transferred and re-purposed.
- Global redesigns and changes can be applied with simple modifications.
Content
Content is information that is organized and stored in a structured manner by eZ Publish. For example, content may be the components of a news article (title, introduction, body, images) or the properties of a product (model, year, color). All information that is stored for the purpose of later retrieval is referred to as "content".
Design
The presentation of content is determined by the design of a site. While content refers to structured data, design refers to the way the data is visually presented. Design includes the things that make up a web interface: HTML, stylesheets (CSS), images that are not part of the content, typography, fonts, and so on.
Webpage components
While content deals with storing and structuring data, design dictates how the content should be presented. These elements combine to form a complete interface - a webpage - as illustrated in the following diagram.
A website refers to the whole, for example http://www.ez.no, while a webpage refers to a specific part of it, for example http://www.ez.no/ezpublish. A website consists of a collection of webpages; it encapsulates and includes everything that belongs to a particular area on the web: configuration settings, a database containing the content structure and content items, content-related files and design-related files.