Site Elements

Overview

Web sites in Websydian Express are built using four different basic building blocks, called site elements: framesets, menus, business processes and URLs. In addition to this comment pages are used intermittent during prototyping in development.

These site elements are used to build the overall structure – called the site structure - of a web site. The site structure are maintained in the administration interface by tying the site elements together in a tree structure.

The five basic building blocks are explained in the following sections.

Framesets

Framesets are used to divide the screen into smaller subdivisions. The contents of each subdivision – or frame - can be controlled individually. It is common to divide the screen vertically with a menu in the left frame and with contents displayed in the right frame as the user selects items in the menu.

The contents of a frame can be specified to be any site element.

Each frame is assigned a name. This name is used to specify where a menu item should display the contents. For example if a user select "contact" a page containing the contact information is displayed in the main frame. But selecting "Home" will probably reload the entire page.

Menus

Menus are known from almost every web site and are a list of choices, that users can use to navigate the site. In Websydian Express menus can be both horizontal, vertical or in-lined somewhere on a page. The menu system of Websydian Express ensures that only menu items that a user’s role permits access to - are displayed.

Business processes

Business processes is what Websydian Express is all about. Business processes are the functionality you want to make available to the users of your web site. Each business process is build as a self-contained module that allows users to perform a specific task on your web site. Simple business processes such as the login dialog are supplied with Websydian Express. Other examples of a business process are “browse product catalogue” and “shopping basket check out”. The modular approach gives designers and administrators the freedom to shift the contents of their web site around without the need to involve developers.

A business process represents a set of program objects and corresponding web pages that forms a logical sequence for a specific operation. In Websydian Express the set of program objects and web pages are called a process. See the section on processes to learn about the relation between business processes and processes. There are a number of different business processes distributed with Websydian Express. You can develop new business processes using the Websydian Developer Suite.

Business processes are attached to menu items using the administration interface. When a user selects the menu item the associated business process is invoked. Browse through the example site included in Websydian Express - as well as the site structure in the administration interface - to see examples of different business processes.

The appearance of business processes are specified in templates by web developers or designers. By creating different sets of templates for your business processes you can differentiate the information presented to users of different roles. See the sections on presentations and templates for more information on this.

URLs

You can integrate existing web pages and web pages with static information in your Websydian Express web sites. Static information are information that is not retrieved from a database or program, but are written directly on the web pages. If you want to display static information or information from an existing web site in Websydian Express all you have to do is to specify the address (the URL) such as http://www.websydian.com as the contents of a frame in the site structure. In the example web site included in Websydian Express the pages “contact” and “about us” are examples of static contents included in a web page. These pages appear as URL’s in the site structure in the administration interface.

Comments

Comments are used when a site is under construction or extended. Comments makes it possible to create a structure for the web site before the final contents such as text or functionality is available. Instead of adding the new functionality you can insert a comment on what the page will contain.

For example if you want to add invoice information to your site you can start by adding a new menu item called "Invoices" and let this menu show a comment saying "this page will show invoice information for the company where the user that are logged in belongs." A high required authorization level can be assigned to the comment making sure that only administrators will see this comment.

When functionality has been agreed upon, developed and tested the comment is replaced by the newly developed invoice business process. Once this has been tested, the required authorization level is lowered thus giving access to the added functionality to customers.

Comments gives you the possibility to test design and new functionality on a live web site in a way that only administrators will see the changes until you are ready to give your customers access.

Site elements

Presentations and content loaders

Site elements is associated with content through presentations. This means that for each menu item in a menu, the corresponding site element has a presentation, and via the presentation a content loader. So when a user activates the menu item, then the associated content loader will be executed for the specified presentation.

For more information please read Content Loaders and Presentations.

The only exception is the URL site element which does not execute a content loader but instead launches an external URL defined on the site element.

Authorization

Access to a site element is controlled by the Websydian Express authorization system by assigning one or more roles to the site element. Only users who have one of these roles will be granted access to the site element.

In practice this means that:

• Only menu items where the user has access to the corresponding site element will be displayed in the menu.
• Frames where the user does not have access to the corresponding site element will not be loaded.
• If a user does not have access to any of the top elements in the site structure, then the user does not have access to the web site.

For more information about authorization in Websydian Express please read Users and Roles.

Site structure

You can find detailed information about the site structure tree in Understanding Site Structure.

Related information