Document type determines the structure of the information confined in a Document.
The definition of the document type is tree structure composed of Document field nodes.
Documents are subject to Skinning. A HTML template determines the markup that will be ultimately shown to the site visitor. Upon creation of the document type an initial template is generated that displays all of the visible fields.
A few example document types:
- news note
- blog post
- article
- product description
Site authors may take one of the two possible routes:
- use separate fields only for document metadata, and use a single HTML formatted field for whole document contents. This gives a lot of power and responsibility to the individual document authors.
- use separate fields both for metadata and contents. Fields would be used for title, subtitle, chapter titles and so on. HTML formatted fields would be used for chapter, subchapter or even paragraph bodies. This is considerably less flexible from the content author point of view, but much more control is given to the document skin author, thus making it easy to maintain consitent appearance across the site.
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