Content Studio Structure

The structure in Content Studio can be compared to the file structure used in Windows or other common fileservers.

The information structure in CS starts with the “root” that has a direct connection to the root of the website. The second level is “Units” and corresponds to the folders that exist in the root of the website. The third level is named “Categories”. The “root” can only contains “Units” and the unit can only contain “Categories”. Categories can contain “Categories” and documents.

Documents in CS are similar to “web files” for example ASP.NET pages, images, CSS, JavaScript. The structure of CS is stored in a SQL-server and mirrored to the file system of the web server. Because all of the files in CS are stored in the SQL-server the only thing you’ll need to restore your website is a valid database backup.

Names of units and categories cannot be changed once they are created. Therefore, it it very important to carefully plan the information structure. Not only will it affect the maintenance of the website, it may also have impact on the performance and the multi-language management. These aspects are described in more detail in the Information structure chapter.

Some settings are generic and applicable on different levels of the structure. Therefore they are described in separate chapters.

• Root settings
• Units, categories and modules

Generic settings

Some settings are equivalent for many different levels of the information structure. Instead of describing them several times, they are collected in this section.

Document directive

Document directive is comparable to the page directive that is used in ASP.NET pages.

<%@Page Language="C#"%>

You can manage and change the page directive by using the button “Document directive”. This will get you to a visual GUI where you have different tabs where you can edit the directive. All changes in the document directive will be inherited down in the structure. The directive will be included in the ASP.NET pages rendered by Content Studio

After the directive is changed you must rewrite the file by approving the document or synchronize the document. Some of the directives are connected to specific file types such as “User Controls” and “Master Pages”. When you are working with a Master Page it’s the directives under the Master Page tab that is used, User controls are using the properties under the User Control tab and so forth.

The documentation of the functions exists as “tooltips” for each directive or by selecting a directive and pressing the key “F1”. The documentation and use are the same as specified at Microsofts MSDN. Page directive can be modified at all levels (Root, Unit, Category and document) in CS

Using publish/archive date

CS supports date and time functionality that automatically publish and un-publish documents depending on your settings. If you’re not using this functionality you can turn off this feature to improve performance. This feature can be modified at all levels (Root, Unit, Category and document) in CS.

Document type (DocType)

Document type sets which document HTML/XHTML standard that will be used when the document is created. When a new site is created the default value is XHTML 1.0 Transitional because this is the document type that works best with CS, ASP.NET and is a good choice when it comes to accessibility questions. The document type can be modified at all levels (Root, Unit, Category and document) in CS.

Encoding and character set

Any text based document is character encoded. Documents in Content Studio are by default Unicode encoded with code page 65001 and the UTF-8 character set. These settings can be set for every structure level through the character settings in the properties dialog. UTF-8 is the most used web site standard and is available for most written languages of the world. Using UTF-8 makes it possible to use many different character sets and encodings in the same document.

The settings cannot be changed for an existing document, unless they are changed for the whole category and the included documents explicitly are included. Changing the document type of a document may require recreation of the effected documents, either by selecting “synchronize documents” or using the tool “Site Content Manager”.

Synchronize document

This function handles document and category synchronization. By running the file synchronization on the site root all units, categories and documents will be rewritten to the file system on the web server from the CS database. This function is useful if you do changes in settings that are affecting the whole website or parts of the website, for example page directives, metadata.

The option to synchronize the content of the EPT-document rebuilds the metadata information and the xml-index of all EPT documents. This feature can be time consuming and temporally affect the performance of the SQL-server.

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