Quick Reference Guide
This is the quick and dirty reference guide to Mirasol CMS.
Mirasol CMS is an Content Management System (CMS) for websites. Well, actually it's a Content Management Framework (CMF) on which you easily can build your own CMS based on your company and editors' needs.
The concept is rather simple: The developer sets up a number of different form fields and an XSLT layout, and then the editors can publish information through the form. You can define any number of templates and use and reuse them to layout the pages of the website.
Templates
Templates are the glue that holds the entire website together. Every page on the website is based on a template the developer has built. You can have a template for each and every page, or you can reuse the templates for similar pages. Think of a template as the paradigm for the design and layout of a page. Once the templates are built, the editors can without any technical knowledge edit and publish pages on the website.
Fields
A template consists of a number of fields which the editors can use to enter information to be published on the website. The fields are of different types such as 'text' for non-formatted text, 'html' for editing and formatting text WYSIWYG style and 'image' for choosing an image from the file library.
Parameters
Parameteres are passed through the rendering engine which transforms the XSLT layouts into valid HTML code before it's sent to the web browser. Parameters are small variables such as a reference to a stylesheet (CSS) or an image from the file library.
Layouts and sublayouts
The final element of a template is the layouts and sublayouts. These are XSL stylesheets where the developer lay outs what becomes the HTML of the pages once the templates are passed through the rendering engine. Most of it is plain HTML, but XSLT makes it possible to add the content of the fields and parameters at the appropriate places.
