Albert te Boekhorst

A component is an instantiation of one of the Tridion (XML) schemas. It is a piece of XML which can be validated against the XML Schema that was created for the specified content type. It contains both content and metadata fields. Useful GUI functions include:

• Versioning makes it possible to revert to a previous version or to compare two different versions.
• ‘Where used’ which shows a list of other Tridion items using this component

A Tridion schema is used to define both the content and meta data fields for a certain type of content (=component in Tridion Lingo). It is an XML Schema which can be generated from the Tridion GUI. Not all options available in XML Schema are available from the GUI. However it is possible to use most XML schema functionality by manually editing the XML Schema.

An example could be the following schema for a news article:

• Fields
  • Title
  • Body
  • Keywords
  • Description
• Meta data fields
  • Source
  • Publish date
  • Alias

The difference between meta data and normal fields is simple: meta data fields are published to the broker DB to the “custom metadata Table” content fields are not. The advantage is that you can query the metadatatable for specific content (i.e. select the last 5 news articles).

Security can be applied to give specific users the right to create news articles and deny it to others.

Additional links:

www.TridionTutorials.com: Schema (site down since 10-2008)

The goal of an alias is to create a link to some article on your web page that is short and descriptive enough for your audience to remember. Application could be for a TV commercial or printed media. In these cases you want to keep the URL short and simple.

For example the url http://website.domain.com/products/2008/1235469/default.aspx is impossible to remember. Therefore you want to be able to create a link like www.domain.com/alias. I have seen a number of interesting and very complicated solutions to this problem. However the easiest way to implement it is the following: Read the rest of this entry »