SuperSatellite

Oh hai gaiz, Im in Myamee!

// February 5th, 2009 // Software, Tech, Web

Guess what?  It’s dotCMS conference time again.  Good times.  I have traveled well, and am ready to do some liveblogging.  For what it’s worth, this year it’s more of a training conference, and I’ll be in the developer sessions.  I’ll pass on info as it’s useful, and will follow up in the end with some of the most useful things they showed.  They also changed the format this year, it’s a little smaller, and rather than being more of a show and tell conference, they’re trying to cater to more of us returning users with this involved how-to stuff.  Looking forward to it.  And to give you a taste of what’s to come, tomorrow is all about the plugin architecture.

I’d like to take a second to remind everyone that you can always join us in the IRC room, or on the mailing list, and there’s also the forum if you ever need help.  I’ll have a Flickr set started soon too.

Getting started this morning in the structures and relationships session.  I’ll try to limit updates to the time when we’re in breaks.

There are three different types of structures to be aware of: content, system, and widget structures.  Content structures are your normal, regular use structures.  System structures are ones that are built into the system, like Web Page Content, and Events, that tie into how the CMS (Content Management System) actually functions, so you can’t delete them.  Widget structures allow custom, dynamic elements, and are frequently used for creating a UI for macros (and as a result, are awesome).

Setting up a structure gives you the ability to tell the system what page to use for a detail page.  This detail page should be designed to pull in the content inode to display it.  This is important for use of things like the permalink macro (or trackback macro).  You can also set up a default review time on content.  This is good for anything that can be time sensitive, but should be used sparingly in my opinion, lest you get inundated with alerts to review content.

Some notes on fields: text fields are limited to 255 characters.  Text fields are the standard, one line fields, similar to what you use on forms for names and addreses.

Ate lunch.  Chili’s sucked, as normal.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never eaten at a Chili’s and been the least bit impressed.  Andres is going to go over setting up dotCMS an the Amazon EC2.  Basically, this is a way to host or set up a dev instance that can be a cheap alternative to a hosted site.  The pricing can be cheaper or more expensive than normal hosting, mostly depending on usage.  If you are looking into this, the ElasticFox plugin for Firefox is a must have for managing your servers once you’ve signed up for an account.  It is not recommended to run a site using a small instance to run anything besides a basic test server.  Small instances run ten cents an hour.  Any real site should look into large instances.  Using elastic IPs, you can point a domain name at your instance to use an actual domain name with the hosting on EC2.

For interested parties, I got a set up on Flickr for photos from the conference.  I totally have to give them credit on the conference swag too, the duffel bag was an awesome touch.