I’m starting to get the hang of setting up structured content in Cascade! It’s a PITA, but can be routinized.
Experiment in oXygen to get the gist of what I want.
Figure out which things should be in the data definition and which things should be in the metadata. (It irritates me greatly that these two pieces are separate from one another.)
Set up the data definition.
Set up the metadata set.
Set up the configuration set. Have discovered that I really like the “calling-page” index block that I learned in training for the DEFAULT area. FWIW, have also discovered that I can’t get the XML configuration working in Global. 🙁 So I have a testing “Site” set up on the dev server for doing the initial version of all of this. Which has the added benefit of keeping separate from all the existing site cruft.
Set up the content type.
Set up the folder & create the first item.
Copy the XML into oXygen, edit the XSLT to match the final product. Copy the XSLT into a format, edit the configuration set to apply the format. Tweak as needed.
If I need a list of items, which so far is always, create an index block of one sort or another, grab the XML, do XSLT in oXygen, etc. Create a page to hold the list, add block to “generated content” area, apply format.
Copy data definition XML and final XSLT files back to local drive.
Go into Global of dev server and do all that setup again, this time, copying and editing the relevant existing configuration set (to get the right template & all that). Tweak everything again as needed until it looks right. Save files locally again.
Once more, with enthusiasm…this time in the correct location on the live server. (Or if I need to show something before creating it in someone else’s folder, set up a folder & pages inside webresources.) Send for review, tweak, etc.
When everything is final, create the asset factory. Make sure to make the base item inside whatever _internal folder applies AND to set that item to not be indexed (in case you’ve got a content type index block). Asking aloud: if the base item isn’t set to be indexed or published, does that mean that new items created from it aren’t either? Hm.
Wondering also about adding index block pages to a publish set. Should that be part of the process, or should I leave it to content creators to publish the index when they publish the item? (Alternatively, any way to trigger publishing?)
I should probably just copy all of that into the team wiki and clean it up a bit. Pretty decent documentation, if I do say so. It’s convoluted, for sure, but not totally horrible. So far I’ve managed to avoid Velocity, which I found actually more annoying than XSLT. I didn’t think that was possible, but there it is. Mainly, I’ve worked out converting dates via an external XSLT that’s bundled in the common folder. (It doesn’t work at all locally, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.) We’ll see what happens when I try to actually create a calendar.
