Albert te Boekhorst

A Component Template  or CT is a small program which is used to render (parts of) components based on  specified schema’s. In other words programs which create chunks of XHTML. In Tridion parlance these chunks are called Component Presentations.

It is possible to use different CT’s to render the same content. An example might be the rendering of a news article. You might want to present on your homepage a link to a new article. On a news overview page you might want to display the title with a short description of the news content. And there will be a place where the full article is displayed.

This can be achieved by defining three different CTs where each one renders the specific occurrence on the website.

Configuration options for a CT include:

• Linking priority. To get the component links pointing towards the full news article version set the linking priority of this CT to high (or the others to low).
• Template type: Vbscript, Jscript, XSLT, Compound template, .NET.
• Output format: XML, HTML, ASP, JSP etc.
• Publication model: Embedded on a page (static), Dynamic.
• Linked schemas. Components based on these schema will be rendered with the CT. •

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)