Albert te Boekhorst

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Publish XML or HTML from Tridion?

Published on 24 February 2009 by

I created a small evaluation in order to make a substantiated choice between publishing XML or HTML from Tridion. I already assume that you made the choice between static and dynamic publishing Perhaps it will be of interest to someone:

XML HTML
Separating content and presentation / Re-usability of data.
Since the web application completely determines how or which parts of the XML content is presented, the same content can easily be displayed in different ways.		 + -
Tridion publishing Performance.
When publishing XML content, Tridion only needs to render one Component Presentation which will take less time then rendering multiple Component Presentations.		 + -
Maintenance and extension of Component Templates.
Your templates in Tridion will be simpler and thus easier to maintain. The complexity is transferred to the web application which is much easier to main then Tridion templates (try debugging or refactoring your code in Tridion).		 + -
Minimizing CMS development dependencies
Changes in the HTML templates will not result into changes of the CMS template code.		 + -
Presentation performance.
Rendering the XML into HTML on the presentation server will use more resources then displaying plain HTML.		 - +
Complexity of the web application
The web application will be partially responsible for rendering the content.		 - +
Grand total + -
 
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SDL Tridion Dynamic component templates vs static Rendering

Published on 5 January 2009 by

Tridion has two main methods for publishing information to websites:

  1. Publishing chunks of content to the Tridion broker
  2. Publishing whole pages to the file system.

Both publishing strategies have already been explained in previous posts. However the fundamental differences between both strategies deserves some additional attention.

Publishing chunks of content (dynamic)

In tridion chunks of content are called component presentations. For this publishing strategy the Tridion rendering tree is traversed until step 4. The result of the rendering is a chunk of XHTML/XML/plain text/ etc. which is subsequently published to the broker DB on the presentation server.

On the presentation server the broker DB will be queried by a website based on ASP, ASP .NET or Java which will use the pre rendered content to create a fully rendered page for the visitors.

Publishing whole pages (static)

In this publishing strategy the full Tridion rendering tree is executed. The result of which can be a file of any type, but usually has one of the following extensions: ASP, JSP, HTML, CSS, XML etc. To get the required results you will need to implement both Component Templates and Page Templates.

Which one to choose?

I recommend the dynamic approach. The static model is quickly becoming obsolete in an era of monthly  website updates and personalization at the top of everybody’s wish list.

A good illustration of why the static model is useless is an update we recently made to the navigation and layout of a website based on the static model (and NO it was not created by me or one of my colleagues). When you make changes to the templating in the static model in Tridion you will need to re-render all of the pages which make use of these templates. In this particular case there were over 2500 pages in the top publication which was blueprinted over 10 times and each blueprint contained an average of 500 local pages.

I needed to explain to the client on several occasions that the go-live was a ‘process’ which would take the better part of 3 days and three nights. The re-rendering of 30K pages would take approximately 60 hours. During this period the website would slowly go from the old look and feel to the new.

Feel free to share your views on this subject in the comments …

 
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SDL Tridion blueprinting for multilingual websites

Published on 15 December 2008 by

Extending your online reach by targeting local audiences in their own language without compromising global brand consistency. This is what Tridion blueprinting is all about:

  • Effectively managing your global message and allow local content editors to adapt and extend that message to incorporate cultural differences and local messages. This will maximize your impact on local markets and still keep the costs manageable.
  • It enables reuse of web applications, cms templating and web design, for each sub site you create. This shortens the time to market for a new website considerably. A good example is the Equens Merger where 6 websites were created in record time.
  • Content can be reused over different websites and channels. There are however some limitations to reusing content in Tridion which need to be considered when creating a Tridion blueprint (todo write about limitations).

In my previous article I showed an elementary blueprint which contained only one language and one website. The picture below shows what the blueprint will look like when an additional language is added.

(more…)

 
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