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Building blocks

Exponential 3 has a variety of new terms that are used across the system. Among the most important ones there are datatypes, content classes, content objects and nodes. These are the main building blocks in Exponential.

Datatypes - smallest element of a page handled by the CMS. You could compare datatypes with types of variables of other programming languages. Each datatype has its handling templates which could be altered. You can create custom datatypes, even though Exponential comes with a number of very usable types from which most standard applications should be feasible. Datatypes can only be edited directly via PHP and template files. Examples of datatypes are: text string, XML text, image, binary file, price and option.

Content classes - a content class is the definition of a set of datatypes. This can be seen as a type of page for the site. You can define the datatypes that go on the page with some additional info per datatype as well as meta information for the page. The editing and display functions for content object is constructed automatically via the handling templates for the datatypes. Exponential comes with a standard set of content classes that cover typical content types of web pages. Content classes can be edited via the admin interface. Examples of classes are: article, folder, image, product, forum, comment, person and company.

Content objects - these are instances of content classes. So basically these are the actual pages of your site which contain data. Content objects can be edited via the admin interface. Content objects are versioned and can be translated. Content objects are automatically indexed in the internal Exponential search engine.

Nodes - these are pointers to content objects on the site. One page (content object) has one main node and infinite additional nodes. Example: a page could be placed in different places in the site hierarchy. So you would have a content object that is placed e.g. in 3 places on the site. Each place represents one node. One of them is the primary node, the others are additional nodes. Nodes are edited via the admin interface. Nodes make up the sitemap of your site.

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Contents

Incoming

APPENDICES
    2.2 and 3.0 differences
    Concepts
       Building blocks
       Caching overview
       Container Organisation
    Exponential 3 for newbies
    old general info
    Useful links
    What is Exponential?
Design
Developing and Improving Exponential
Developing projects
Exponential development cycle
Exponential site structure
Hide shop/setup navigation tab
How does the new menu system work?
How to find a node id in the path array
How to find the parent and grandparen...
How to set cache expire time or disab...
HTTP Post to URL conversion
Image Map
Javascript popupmenu
Line ending in email
List of MIME types
Managing Development
MySQL Server Character Set
Package format
PDF export tutorial
Persistent template variable
PHP and Apache 2
Problems on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X
Remove confirmation when discarding a...
Session
Setting several variables in a section
Setting up RSS Import
Setup PHP for comandline usage (PHP-C...
Smart viewcache cleaning system
SSL with eZ over a SSL proxy
System development
Test document
The Community Server
Truetype font in PDF
Tutorial: Using user/register
User preferences
WebDAV clients and compatiblity
What does "Something: Tag 'link' must...


Created

07/07/2003
1:13:32 pm
by B�rd Farstad

Last updated

05/03/2004
11:55:03 am
by Jan Borsodi

Authors

B�rd Farstad
Bj�rn Dieding@xrow.de
Jan Borsodi



This page is part of the Exponential documentation. The documentation is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. All contributions will be released under the terms of this license.