Designs and siteaccesses

These documentation pages are no longer maintained. Please visit the new documentation site.

A siteaccess may make use of several designs. This means that the result of a page rendered by eZ publish may be a combination of files from various designs. Each and every siteaccess can have:

One main design
None or several additional designs
One standard design

At the bare minimum, a siteaccess should always have at least a main design and a standard design.

Automatic fallback
If eZ publish is unable to find a design specific file (be it a template, an image, etc.) within the directory of the main design that was specified for the siteaccess, it will automatically attempt locate the file within the additional designs. The system will sequentially go through all the additional designs, looking for the requested file. At last, if the requested file still hasn't been found, eZ publish will attempt to locate it within the directory of the standard design. The following diagram illustrates this functionality.

The automatic fallback mechanism described above opens up for a lot of possibilities and flexibility. For example, it makes the reuse and combination of designs an easy matter.

Comments

The reason for this?

Jonathan Dillon-Hayes

Saturday 23 October 2004 3:43:33 pm

I don't quite understand the logic of this architecture, and am hoping someone who reads this comment will reply. The only reason I can think of that you would want failover design is if something failed on a production server, but that's a problem that's easily solved. Why have it pull from multiple design directories? Couldn't that lead to a lot of running around trying to figure out where particular elements are coming from. I'd love to hear more of an explanation for why eZ is built this way.

Exponential - The Content Management Ecosystem

User menu

Path

Designs and siteaccesses

Comments

The reason for this?

Contents

Incoming

Created

Last updated

Authors