The Ektron CMS400.NET v8 platform is easy to use from a content provider perspective and it offers flexibility and scalability from the developer’s perspective. The flexibility allows users to build and customize functionality that is essential.
Smart Forms
Ektron Smart Forms are a powerful tool that allows users to enter structured content into their CMS400 implementations. Smart Forms can minimize the number of templates to manage in order to layout structured content elements. The Smart Forms are content entry forms that allow information to be entered in a structured format and stored in the CMS as XML data.
The way the CMS stores the XML Data has benefits like a standardized format for capturing content, superior control over content display and improved search capabilities. The XML structure is very simple and easy to understand. This way developers can read it and create an XSLT file in order to display the returned XML data, or if they want, use any other way to display the data (see image below).
With Smart Forms you can manage Rich Internet Applications built by developers in Adobe Flex or Microsoft Silverlight.
Ektron v8 has a performance improvement over previous versions of Smart Forms. They are faster to load when you are trying to add or edit content that is assigned to a Smart Form. The web editor has also been improved - with more advanced features on validation, load default data, etc. We also noticed that Ektron v8 brings a new feature that allows us to select the XML format in which we want to store the data (see image below).
The dialog lets you generate XML micro formats made up of standard XHTML tags and attributes that contain a specific structure and values. The types are described below.
| Type |
This field defines |
| Element |
A unique tag. The user's response to the field becomes its value. |
| Attribute |
An attribute of the containing field. The containing field is typically a Group Box. |
| Content |
The content of the containing field, typically a Group Box.
Note that, in this case, field name is not used. As a result, the Field Name field is grayed out. The field name and type can only be edited on the Advanced Field properties screen.
Since most fields define their own content, this option is typically used to define a value to a Group Box that contains other fields defined as attributes. |
In previous versions there was a fixed limit of 200 items when pulling data through a List Summary. In order to solve the problem you had to use SQL Queries directly to the database to return what you wanted, for example:
SELECT * FROM content_tbl WHERE (folder_tbl_id = 1) ORDER BY custom_field
Now with Ektron v8, the List Summary control allows you to define the number of items you want returned. And the performance is now even faster than before.
Conclusion
From a developer’s perspective it’s time for you to do an upgrade. Ektron v8 will bring to you a new powerful way to work with Smart Forms; you can select XML format in which you want to store the data in the Database and then work with the returned XML data as you prefer. It will not only improve your coding time but it will also reduce custom code without having to do SQL Queries directly to the DB.