The purpose of this post is to solve a Blueprint design exercise based on some specific requirements.
The intended audience for this article are individuals that want to gain knowledge of how to analyze and design using SDL Tridion Blueprint Principles.
Scenario
Websites offering different products per continent
Requirements
A company that manufactures products in different continents wants to design a blueprint model for maintain all the websites.
Products are manufactured in 3 different continents (Africa, America, Europe).
The types and structure of the products are completely different depending on the continent.
Products manufactured in each continent must be available only to the Websites of countries that belong to that continent.
Continents do not share products and never will.
Currently there are no requirements for translation, all the websites will offer content in English. You are asked to analyze the relevant areas of the Blue Print related to content, no design considerations, structure nor translation are required at this point. In the next post we will add more requirements and analyze those.
Solution
This is scenario has clear requirements for having a master publication for creating the common schemas and one publication per continent for creating the schemas applicable to that continent (most of those schemas are related to products). The following diagram represents the blueprint structure. Each box represents a Publication and the red arrows show the inheritance between publications
0000 Empty Parent Publication is the Scalability Level, is left empty
1000 Schema Master Publication is used for create the Master Schemas and Categories
Here will be created the schemas shared across all the continents
2001 Africa Schemas, 2002 America Schemas and 2003 Africa Schemas Publications are used for create the specific schemas per continent
3000 Content Master Publication is used for create the common content shared across all the continents
4001 Africa Content, 4002 America Content and 4003 Europe Content Publications are used for create the specific content per continent.
Each one inherits from the schema publication applicable to the continent.
Learn More
Click here to go to the next section of the exercise
"Never will" is an interesting requirement in Web and systems development. :-)
ReplyDeleteSeparating the Schema Publications like this does indeed separate the Content between the continents. Certain Publications will only see the Schemas and no additional authorization settings are needed (sharing Schemas is fine too, it just may need permissions to restrict which Publications get which Schemas).
If I had this BluePrint, depending on the authors, I'd look to make the Schema XML structure and descriptions similar to make templating and authoring easier. Standards and conventions go a long way.
And in the case of "never will" changes to "we changed our mind," the Content Manager-side APIs (currenlty the Core Service) and clever BluePrinting can help. :-)