Boris,
I suspect what Vincent means is that most web shops don't want to look
like databases - by entering all of the data for products into data
nodes you end up being forced to make very standardised pages, and if
a particular product needs a special note, or you wan to show an image
of it in use etc. then that needs to be encoded into your data schema.
The pharmaceutical company website you point out obviously isn't in
that kind of market, and the database style suits it well - not
everything is like that.
I recently worked on a shop-like site where we used the alternative
approach of giving every product its own page ( http://www.mandarinStoneFrance.com
). Details about the product were stored on the page node and could
be edited by clicking a page property editing button at the top of the
page, or by editing certain fixed page elements, and then most of the
actual page itself was generated from the template reading those
properties. Because all the essential information (product image,
price, basic features etc. were stored on the page node itself we
could still treat the pages as data nodes and query them to show lists
of products etc.. However, the product page was still a normal page,
which allowed the web site owner to customise it by adding extra text
and image paragraphs to the standard template if they want - they
could also use all the normal magnolia tools for laying out the page
etc. This gave us the best of both worlds by having the flexibility of
a CMS to design product pages, and yet the power of a data driven site
for doing things like searches, product lists etc. We also found that
from a user experience point of view the owner of the site found it
much more natural to enter information about products on the product
page itself because it was much more WYSIWYG than entering data into
dry forms.
Josh
On 1 Aug 2008, at 18:11, Boris Kraft wrote:
Vincent
I am not sure why you think so. The data module uses the same
mechanisms we use anywhere else, specifically, the dialogs and
controls you can use in the data module are the same as in the web
repository. In other words, you can have a product detail dialog in
the data module that contains all the rich and nice-looking details
you wish to have. Once it is in there, you can use either search
queries to retrieve matches or simply link to products in a more
static sense.
By the way, this is something we did for the new magnolia.info site,
where we defined a "text-block" in the data module which then can
be referenced from other pages. In particular, we do this for the
news section, where each press release shows an "about Magnolia"
block to the right of the release. This allows us to reuse this info
anywhere on the site, and maintain it in a single place,
independently of the actual site structure.
For another example of this functionality, look at http://www.mepha.com/international/en/products.html
where we use the data module with the scheduler to import data from
an SAP system, augment it using Magnolia's end user dialogs and
finally render it dynamically with a multi-step advanced-search
implementation. (for an example of the latter, select "Anti-
malarials" from therapeutic area, and you will get a second set of
search constraints)
Cheers
Boris
On Jul 6, 2008, at 5:10 PM, Vincent F. wrote:
Hi,
Personally I would use data module only for storing commercial
details (price, stock quantity) and orders. Relying only on the
data and dms modules would make difficult to compose rich and nice-
looking product pages.
Vincent
- Relying heavily on the data module (and the dms module for images)
- Implementing controller classes and beans to minimize the amount
of scriptlets in the JSPs
- Creating custom magnolia dialogs for the data management (of
course importers would be nice too)
- And also implementing one default set of shop pages (JSPs) to
have the module work "out of the box"
Did this answer your question or did I misunderstand you?
-will
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