Ensure success for your Fatwire project / 1

These days I am discussing the plan for a Fatwire project. I was asked (and it is not the first time)  what to do to ensure success.

I decided to share some  thoughts (at least the less technical ones, those  more generally applicable). Since the post is long, I have split it in a sequence of posts.

While planning your website, you will have to take a few precautions. Fatwire ContentServer is not Joomla, where all you have to do is to pick a design and code a few templates to render your site design.

Fatwire is a complex Enterprise Content Management system, where Enteprise actually means something more than just a high price. More specifically it means:

• flexible (but complex) content model definition

• powerful but very specific tag library, hard to use correctly unless you know the big picture

• high performance but complex cache management

Content Model Definition

Let's start with the Content Model definition. Content Models in Fatwire are very rich, much  richer and complex than the average. A Fatwire website is truly defined by his ContentModel.

A good content model will make easy to manage your site. A bad content model will make  it a pain.

Content Model is not just  articles (with title, author, summary and text), although I have seen sites built this way...

Content Model in Fatwire are pretty complex because they impact  both the editorial interface, the template coding  and, most important, the caching strategy.

So here my advices about the content model.

Do:

• Grab your site design (your nice photoshop mockups) and ask someone competent to design the content model.
• A good design will recognize common elements (and  distinguish different elements as well) and exploit the common patterns of your site (summary, boxes, links etc)
• Test the content model BEFORE starting to code  templates

How to test a content model? It is easy: once configured the content model in Fatwire, and before you code the templates,  ask your editorial team to compose some key part of the site like the home page. You will immediately learn if the Content Model is right or not.

Do not

• Throw your site design to inexperienced  developer, allowing them to code  the content model directly on the backend, with no design and no plan.
• Rush to code the content model without ensuring it works for your Editorial Team
• Deploy the site just coded without stress testing it

Very likely,  this way you will get either a very expensive static site ( that is using the SitePlan for everything). Very often, inexperienced developers create a  new entire FLEX FAMILY for each content.

(a flex family is a group of related content, and creating a flex family for each content is a devastating but common error).

This will induce a lot of template coding errors that will in turn will result a site impossible to edit and very very very slow...

In the next post I will tell more about the relation between template and cache.

Stay tuned.

Posted by msciab