Best practice

The One True Container – RedDot CMS Tutorial – Part I

In RedDot CMS SmartTree it should now look like this:

SmartTree

The main advantages of this approach are both the speed (the sales team can create an example of your web site in RedDot very quickly this way) and simplicity of the implementation (hence why it is so good for training). The disadvantages, however, are numerous:

• It promotes the use of multiple base templates with similar HTML code, resulting in any changes having to be meticulously applied to multiple base templates.
• Adding a new link that is common for all pages (ie CSS or Javascript files) requires you to update all instances of the content class. While RedDot provides a plugin to do this, by default it is limited to 1000 instances per content class – and this can only (easily) be raised to a maximum of 2000 due to the limitations of Redot’s search results.
• Localisation of interface elements (eg Search, Next, Previous etc) – text and graphics – is at best as problematic as adding new links. (You can put defaults in, but only for one language! Otherwise you have to update every instance in your other language variants)
• It promotes the use of excessive content and structural elements. At best this slows down SmartTree and makes it harder to find the elements you are actually interested in. At worst, SmartTree only shows a certain number of items (or at least, it did prior to version 9) and you can’t access elements beyond that. I wouldn’t be surprised if publishing is giving the page builder a heart attack either.

Handy Hint
The ¨Reference Link in Clipboard for All Content Class Instances¨and ¨Reference Page in Clipboard for All Content Class Instances¨ plugins provided by RedDotOpenText are hardcoded to work for the first 1000 instances per content class only. You should modify this to 2000.

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About the author:

Adrian Mateljan lives in Reading, United Kingdom but is actually an Australian hailing from Perth, Western Australia. Currently contracting in London specialising in RedDot CMS.

Tags: base page templates