Component
A Component is a block of content plus a template - a “piece” of a website - such as an infobox, a footer or an image or just a piece of text.
Context:
- Global - Can be re-used on any page
- Page - A specific page or article
- Simple - A simple data type
Categories:
Each Component can belong in 1 or more Component Categories so that a Container can specify what category of Components can be placed. Several Global Components could be of category “footer” so that only these would be allowed in a Global Container at the bottom of a page.
For example, all global components could be defined in 1 file called component/global.xml:
<components>
<component id="1">
<name>Header</name>
<template>Header</template>
<categories>
<category>Default</category>
</categories>
<content>
<text>My Website</text>
<logo>MyLogo.gif</logo>
<background>#FFDDCC</background>
</content>
</component>
.
.
.
</components>
Another alternative would be each component in a seperate XML file in the folder /component/global/ but this would make it difficult to reference I think. When all components are in 1 folder, a simple XPath expression will do:
/components/component[@id=1]/content
A further simplification could be that the template is optional. In this case the <content> element is passed through as XHTML.
<content><h1>My Heading</h1></content>

Bitflux calls their Global Components “Portlets“
Comment by Administrator — September 24, 2005 @ 8:14 pm