Publication of information
Smartsite iXperion has a very powerful engine for publishing information stored within the Smartsite CMS. Because of the separation of content and formatting, this information can be presented in different ways.
Information is published once a request for information takes place. A common way to request information is by use of the http protocol. Therefore the information stored in the CMS is presented as a web-site, configured with a webserver, with an unique server address:
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http://www.myserveraddress.com |
Normally, this serveraddress contains flat files, stored hierarchically with help of folders, which can be reqeusted directly. For example, if a site contains an HTML file LatestNews.html within the folder News, the address to retrieve this file will be like:
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http://www.myserveraddress.com/news/latestnews.html; |
Within the Smartsite CMS, information is not stored in flat HTML files but in a a database. From the CMS point of view, the information is stored in separate items. Each of these items has an unique number. So, requesting information from the Smartsite CMS is done through the itemnumber. But, as stated before, information stored in the CMS can be published in different ways. To distinguish the different publications, each of the publications has an unique document to be requested for. In fact, each request is a request for the publications default document and the query string is used to request for a specific item:
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http://www.myserveraddress.com/smartsite.net?id=2 |
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http://www.myserveraddress.com/raw.net?id=2 |
The example above shows to requests for the same item, but both with a different default document. Based on the default document the Smartsite Publication Engine can invoke an other rendertemplate to render the information in a different way.
When using friendly Urls, the friendly Url will be translated into the format as shown above at the beginning of a request.
Developers who used previous versions of Smartsite will note that the extra querystring parameter ch is removed from Smartsite Urls and will understand the need for a unique default document per channel.