[webproducers] Re: dynamic creation of linked pages
- From: Morry Galonoy <galonoym@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'webproducers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <webproducers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 12:41:58 -0500
Luisa,
Welcome and thanks for the comments. Although you refer to yourself as an
"abroad" member you'll be happy to know that many of our me members are
abroad. We are by no means a USA group and that's indicated in our broad
membership form places like Brazil, Australia, Canada, UK, Sweden, and
others.
Best,
Morry
-----Original Message-----
From: Luisa - Cummings Mitchell [mailto:luisa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 12:19 PM
To: webproducers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [webproducers] Re: dynamic creation of linked pages
luisafri@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Hello everybody! I have been a silent/abroad observor of you guys for the
past few months, and I love the dynamic of the news letter and they way you
pitch in to help each other.
Kelly, I know a company in Ottawa www.pixelera.com that has developed a
product called Onthefly - a tool in a box that you can customize to handle
dynamic content. OntheFly is a Web-based software that enables organizations
to collect data, create reports and publish content through a standard
Internet browser. It may be worth your time to contact these people and find
out a bit more about it.
And let me know how it turns out!
Regards,
Luisa (Lulu) in Canada.
-----Original Message-----
From: webproducers-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:webproducers-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Tracy Scott
Sent: January 30, 2002 7:34 PM
To: webproducers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [webproducers] Re: dynamic creation of linked pages
blebs@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>Dear All, Currently about 90% of the content in my company intranet is
>static html pages that are created and updated by hand. The remaining 10%
of
>the content is dynamic and is stored in a SQL database that is populated
and
>maintained by a series of easy-to-use ColdFusion data-entry forms.
>
>My task is to make the static content dynamic, but in such a way that going
>forward, it will be easy for users to create and maintain their own content
>pages. The ColdFusion forms that are currently on the site do the job for
>simple types of content but they are not granular enough to capture the
more
>complex ones that are in static html. What I'm trying to do is structure
the
>data that's captured in the forms so that once it is saved to the database,
>I can pull out just the bits I want and reuse them in different content
>areas of the site.
>
>I talked to my ColdFusion developer about this idea, and he tells me that
>this can be done, but he doesn't know how to do it since the data would
need
>to be structured before it was imported into the database in order for
>certain bits to be retrieved from the database later. The problem is that I
>want the forms to dynamically create linked pages, or create links to pages
>that do not already exist in the database before the new data is imported.
>
>Folks in Content Systems at my company are telling me that XML is the way
>to go here but they're not sure how to integrate it with ColdFusion. So ---
>I'm looking for a bridge between the two and was wondering if anyone on
this
>list has experience dealing with solutions for creating structured and
>dynamic linked pages. Or, for company intranets, if there are any tools in
a
>box that you have found provide good content management.
>
>Thanks for your feedback.
>
>-Kelly
>
>
>
>
>
>__________________________________________________________________________
>To unsubscribe send a blank message with unsubscribe in the subject to
webproducers-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>To access our webform (instead of sending e-mail) for popular commands
including subscribe, unsubscribe, digest, and vacation visit
www.WebProducers.org. You can also access the list archive at the website.
>
>Questions and comments are welcome just e-mail me, morry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
Our company offers a hosted portal solution. It works extremely well for
intranets and allows even the most non-technical people to update
content. Our
VP of marketing even updates our corporate site directly, which runs on our
own solution. You can see a demo at http://www.wegosales.com. One of
the biggest advantages of the system is that you can create new intranets on
the fly as you need them. Internally, we create new intranets all the
time for
various projects.
As to your specific problem, modeling the data explicitly in the
database for
each form comes at a pretty high cost in database management. Using XML
is definitely your best bet. You don't want to have your DBA involved each
time you want to create a new form. The disadvantage of storing structured
data in XML format is that you can't use relational SQL queries to retrieve
the data. For data querying, you can try something like XML Query.
see.. http://www.w3.org/XML/Query
For presentation of your data, you will want to use XSLT to convert the
semantic
XML data into HTML.
So, you get something that looks like....
HTML Form
|
|
v
Cold Fusion Server code that takes HTTP post parameters and
writes an XML file
|
|
v
XML <person><name>Tracy Scott</name><phone>650-569-3620x124</phone></person>
|
|
v
XSLT which takes as input the XML above and might produce the following
output HTML:
|
|
v
HTML
<b>Tracy Scott</b>
<em>650-569-3620x124</em>
That describes how you go from structured data input to HTML that is
ready to be presented somewhere. A framework for managing where that
HTML is presented is slightly more involved. Let's say that the HTML
is stored in contactinfo/*formresponseid*.html, so my specific response
might be stored in a file called contactinfo/543.html. Your response might
be stored in contactinfo/29.html. Now to link that into your site structure
as new forms are created, you might have a file called contactinfo/all.html
that contains the links to all the *formresponseid*.html files. The
all.html
file needs to be updated each time a new *formresponseid*.html file is
generated or it can be created on the fly based on a directory listing
of the
files in contactinfo/. I'm not a ColdFusion developer, so I can't really
help with example code. There is probably a way in ColdFusion to
execute an external program, so you would just need a standalone XSLT
processor and have ColdFusion make a call like...
system ("xslt contact.xsl 543.xml 543.html");
I'm not familiar with the specifics of ColdFusion syntax, but the idea is
that you run the xslt program which takes a style sheet, an input XML file,
and output HTML file as arguments. contact.xsl is the XSL stylesheet you
need to write which determines how to turn the contact info XML into HTML.
For the example, whenever it sees <name> tags, it replaces them with <b>
tags. Whenever it sees <phone> it replaces it with <em>'s.
Using XSLT would allow you to filter the data in XML as you
are translating it to HTML. For example, in the case above, you could
generate
an additional file called contactinfo/543_nophone.html that contains my
contact info without the phone number. So, it allows you to selectively
present subsets of data fairly easily. You just lose the ability to do
complicated
relational queries.
If you are free to consider hosted solutions, you should definitely check
out our system. I've designed it in an effort to commoditize all the
typical
grunt work in deploying and managing a large number of sites.
Jakob Nielsen (http://www.useit.com) has a nice report about effective
intranets,
so if you have the $54 to spare, I'd highly recommend it.
If you have any more questions feel free to ask.
Tracy Scott
CTO
Wego Systems
http://www.wego.com
650-569-3620x124
__________________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe send a blank message with unsubscribe in the subject to
webproducers-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To access our webform (instead of sending e-mail) for popular commands
including subscribe, unsubscribe, digest, and vacation visit
www.WebProducers.org. You can also access the list archive at the website.
Questions and comments are welcome just e-mail me, morry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
__________________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe send a blank message with unsubscribe in the subject to
webproducers-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To access our webform (instead of sending e-mail) for popular commands
including subscribe, unsubscribe, digest, and vacation visit
www.WebProducers.org. You can also access the list archive at the website.
Questions and comments are welcome just e-mail me, morry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
__________________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe send a blank message with unsubscribe in the subject to
webproducers-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To access our webform (instead of sending e-mail) for popular commands
including subscribe, unsubscribe, digest, and vacation visit
www.WebProducers.org. You can also access the list archive at the website.
Questions and comments are welcome just e-mail me, morry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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