Building Complex Outlines In Conversant
Recently the Conversant folks added a weboutline macro to the mix of features.
Maintaining a hierarchical site map by hand doesn’t sound like that daunting of a prospect, but once you pass a certain threshold it gets to be a nightmare. I ran into this problem at my Overpopulation.Com site where I ended up with several hundred pages in a FAQ-like arrangement that was a real pain to manage (which meant I simply didn’t).
With a few macros, however, I can produce a pretty decent looking site outline. I’m still not completely satisfied with the site outline — it presents too much information — but it’s a start.
There are several advantages to the approach that Conversant uses to achieve this outline. First, it is done at the macro level so it is possible to mix the web outline with other text and even other macros. In fact each of the major headings in my Overpopulation.Com outline is a separate macro.
Second, the macro accepts templates so I can control the output in any number of ways, and again I can mix and match to get exactly the page I want.
Third, the macro smartly caches the results of the web outline. This is crucial when you start talking about hundreds of pages. The weboutline macro has a “cache” variable which can be set to “false” (i.e. it will dynamically generate the outline every time) and can also be set to a numeric value such as “72″ which is effectively the number of hours that the system will wait before updating the outline and in the meantime it serves up a cached version of the outline.
This works very well for a site like Overpopulation.Com where the structure is unlikely to change significantly on a daily basis.
Tags: Conversant