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Blueprint Developer Manual / Version 2401

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5.3.1 Common Content Types

Requirements

An appealing website does not only contain text content but has also images, videos, audio files or allows you to download other assets such as brochures or software.

In addition, current websites aim to reuse content in different contexts. An article about the Hamburg Cyclassics might appear in Sports, Hamburg and News section, for example. An image of the St. Michaelis church (the "Hamburger Michel") on the other hand might appear in Articles about sights in Hamburg or religion. Nevertheless, it's not a good idea to copy the article to each section or the image to each article because this is error prone, inefficient and wastes storage.

Therefore, content should be reusable across different contexts (different sites, customer touchpoints for instance) by just applying the context specific layout and without having to duplicate any content. This increases the productivity by reducing redundancy and keeps management effort at a minimum.

Solution

CoreMedia Blueprint is shipped with content types that model common digital assets such as articles, images, videos or downloads. All these types inherit from a common parent type and can be used interchangeably. In addition, none of these types has fixed information about its context so that it can be used repeatedly and everywhere in your site. The context is first determined through the page which links to the content item or through the position in the folder hierarchy of the website (see Section 5.4.2, “Navigation and Contexts” for more details).

Common Content Types

CoreMedia Blueprint defines the following types for common content. Using CoreMedia's object oriented content model projects can define their own content types or add to the existing ones.

CMArticle
UI Name Article
Description Contains mostly the textual content of a website combined with images.
CMPicture
UI Name Picture
Description Stores images of the website. The editor can define different crops of the image which can be used in different locations of the website.
CMVideo
UI Name Video
Description Stores videos which can be viewed on the website.
CMAudio
UI Name Audio
Description Stores audio/podcast information which can be heard on the website.
CMDownload
UI Name Download
Description Stores binary data for download. You can add a description, image and the like.
CMGallery
UI Name Gallery
Description Aggregates images via a linklist. You can add a description, teaser text and the like.

Table 5.1. Overview of Content Types for common content


eCommerce Placeholder Types

Blueprint comes with some additional content types required to build representations of entities of a commerce system.

CMProductTeaser
UI Name Product Teaser
Description A teaser for products of the commerce system. It inherits from CMTeasable
CMMarketingSpot
UI Name e-Marketing Spot
Description A placeholder for an e-Marketing spot. It inherits from CMTeasable.
CMExternalChannel
UI Name Category Placeholder
Description Content items of this type are used to build a CMS representation of commerce categories. It inherits from CMAbstractCategory which in turn inherits from CMChannel.
CMExternalPage
UI Name Placeholder for other shop pages such as Help pages or the main page.
Description Content items of this type are used to build a CMS representation of other commerce pages. It inherits from CMChannel.

Table 5.2. Commerce Content Types


Commerce Content Properties

A short description of the properties provided for eCommerce scenarios is provided below.

externalId
UI Name External ID
Description The ID of the corresponding entity in the commerce system. For a CMProductTeaser this id is the technical id of the product in the catalog.
localSettings.shopNow
UI Name 'Shop Now' flag
Description

This Boolean flag is stored in the local settings of the content types CMProductTeaser and CMExternalChannel and is used in the content-led scenario. If enabled the 'Shop Now' overlay is visible for product teasers. This configuration is extendable via CMExternalChannels and may be overwritten for everyCMProductTeaser.

Table 5.3. Overview Commerce Content Properties


Common Content Properties

All common content types extend the abstract type CMTeasable to share common properties and functionality. Teasable means that you can show for each content that inherits from CMTeasable a short version that "teases" the reader to watch the complete article, site or whatever else.

A short description of the core properties of content is provided below. Properties specific for certain Blueprint features such as teaser management etc. are described in their respective sections (follow the link in the Description column).

title
UI Name (Asset) Title
Description The name or headline of an asset, for example the name of a download object or the headline of an article.
detailText
UI Name Detail Text
Description A detailed description, for example the article's text, a description for a video or download.
teaserTitle, teaserText
UI Name Teaser Title and Text
Description The title and text used in the teaser view of an asset. See Section 5.4.9, “Teaser Management”.
pictures
UI Name Pictures
Description A reference to CMPicture items that illustrate content. Examples include a photo belonging to the article, a set of images from a video etc. Usage of the pictures depends on the rendering. In Blueprint the pictures are used for teasers and detail views of content.
related
UI Name Related Content
Description The related content list refers to all items that an editor deems related to the content. For an article for a current event this list could include a video describing of the event, a download with event brochure, an audio/podcast file with an interview with the organizers, an image gallery with photos of the previous event and many more.
keywords
UI Name Keywords
Description Keywords for this content. CoreMedia Blueprint currently uses keywords as meta information for the HTML <head>.
subjectTaxonomy
UI Name locationTaxonomy
Description Tags for this content. See Section 5.3.3, “Tagging and Taxonomies” for details.
viewType
UI Name Layout Variant
Description The layout variant influences the visual appearance of the content on the site. It contains a symbolic reference to a view that should be used when the content is rendered. For more information see Section 5.4.7, “View Types”
segment
UI Name URL Segment
Description A descriptive segment of a URL for this content. Used for SEO on pages displaying the content. See Section 5.4.15, “URLs”
locale, master, masterVersion
UI Name Locale, Master, Master Version
Description See Section 5.5, “Localized Content Management” for details. Properties for the Localization of this asset.
validFrom, validTo
UI Name Valid From, Valid To
Description Meta information about the validity time range of this content. Content which validity range is not between validFrom and validTo will not be displayed on the website. See Section 5.4.17, “Content Visibility” for details.
notSearchable
UI Name Not Searchable Flag
Description Content with this flag will not be found in end user website search. See Section 5.4.21, “Website Search” for details.

Table 5.4. Overview Common Content Properties


Media Content

The abstract content type CMMedia defines common properties for all media types. Media types for content such as pictures (CMPicture), video (CMVideo), audio (CMAudio), and HTML snippets (CMHTML) inherit from CMMedia.

data
UI Name Data
Description The core data of the content. Either a com.coremedia.cap.common.Blob or in the case of CMHTML a com.coremedia.xml.Markup.
copyright
UI Name Copyright
Description Allows you to store arbitrary copyright information in a string property.
alt
UI Name Alternative Representation
Description Allows managing alternative representations of an image, for example a description of an image that can be used to enable a website accessible for the visually impaired.
caption
UI Name Caption
Description The caption of a content. Unused property in Blueprint.

Table 5.5. CMMedia Properties


A common feature of all CMMedia objects is the ability to generate and cache transformed variants of the underlying object (see CMMedia#getTransformedData). This ability is extensively used for rendering images without the need to store image variants and renditions as distinct blobs in the system.

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