One requirement I have for WCM is that the content template definitions lend themselves to reuse. Many of the commercial WCM offerings today are very limited in this ability. In sites where hundreds of templates are implemented you wind up with a maintenance nightmare.
For example, if I have a chunk in a piece of web content that includes name, address, city, and state, I ought to only have to declare that chunk once and be able to easily reuse it across many templates.
Same story for presentation. If I write a chunk of XSLT that transforms the address XML into HTML, I only want to define that XSLT once and then use something like xsl-include to refer to it.
One requirement I have for WCM is that the content template definitions lend themselves to reuse. Many of the commercial WCM offerings today are very limited in this ability. In sites where hundreds of templates are implemented you wind up with a maintenance nightmare.
Agreed and excellent requirement. At Interwoven I saw this in EVERY customer installation - people needed "nested" templates for both data capture and presentation. We will take this under serious advisement.
More generally, we are already planning template reuse across sites. Templates for both data capture (forms) and for data presentation will be stored in a central library. Websites will "subscribe" to forms and templates and enable a delegated admin associate different users/groups/roles with the ability to access a form to create content and specify rules as to which template(s) should be applied to content and whether it is optional or mandatory. So our goal is to already enable reuse of templates across projects; I think it equally important to enable the reuse at a lower level amongst these centralized forms and templates for common items.
Stay tuned for the update we plan on placing on the wiki regarding our new publishing framework end of next week.
