About Data Entry Templates

The pages composing a Web site typically fall into just a few categories. Even a large e-commerce site, with hundreds of Web pages, typically groups them into a home page and a small number of categories such as catalog listings, weekly specials, news releases, job postings, and the like.

Web pages within each category have identical design and similar content. One job posting, for example, looks like another job posting and contains similar kinds of information.

You create a data entry template for each category of Web page: for example, one data entry template for catalog listings, another for job postings, and so on. In each data entry template, you specify the kinds of information that will appear on all Web pages in that category; later, Contributors use these data entry templates to create content items and enter content for Web pages.

To create data entry templates, you assemble properties—one property for each variable component of a Web page. In a data entry template for job postings, for example, you might include properties for job title, hiring manager, responsibilities, qualifications, salary range, and start date.

When you create a property, you assign a property type to specify the kind of information the property should hold: text, long text, integer, date, item (a reference to another content item), image, file, list, and selection list.

A data entry template for job postings, for example, might include these properties and types:

For more information on using programming logic in Publisher, see the Publisher Templating Specification in the BEA AquaLogic User Interaction Development Center.