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.
This post continues the previous article analyzing additional requirements, so is recommended to have a look at that first.
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.
In the current analysis session, the following requirements are captured.
Certain countries in Europe must be able to produce their own products based on different schemas that those identified at the continent level.
At this point only France has this requirement, although some countries could follow the same approach in the future.
Solution
To deal with this new requirement we have two different options.
Option 1
We can create a new publication per country that is required to have its own schemas for handle the products.
We make the content country publication to inherit from that publication.
This provides a more clear separation for the specific country schemas but requires changes in the blueprint model.
The following diagram represents the changes required in the blueprint.
The additional publications are colored in blue and are the publications used for create the specific schemas for France (3001 France Schemas) and the publication for store the content for France (5000 France Content)
Option 2
We can create a folder per country that is required to have its own schemas for handle the products at the Schema Continent Publication.
Those folders will be hidden for all the countries that belong to the continent except the one that is applicable.
This option doesn't require changes in the Blueprint Mode and obviously reduces the amount of publications required in the system but requires to use security to hide the folders for the specific country.
This is a safe approach when we are not 100% sure if the schemas will become globally used at some point. Turning those visible to all countries can be handled just removing the permissions.
This technique can applicable to other publications with similar requirements
Learn More
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I see this country-specific Schema option (the France Publications in blue) a good fit when the product catalog or PIM (product information system) integration is distinct to the country-level, possibly supported by different architecture, development teams, or unique brands and products.
ReplyDeleteI'd be careful with editorial and promotional content types (Schemas), however. I wouldn't want your readers to assume Schemas-per-Country was typical of Tridion BluePrinting.
There's only so many ways to define an "article" or "promotion" and we're seeing a consolidation of sorts to make the editorial, development, and visitor parts easier. The Tridion Reference Implementation (TRI) has a News Article example with one Schema and a variety of presentations. TRI also uses Schema.org, which attempts to give content types meaning beyond their HTML markup.
The main idea is that content has meaning and that meaning is carried from definition in the back-office systems (like Tridion) to presented markup. What does this means to BluePrinting? Fewer Schema Publications (again, at least for Web editorial content).