Introduction

The Escenic Content Engine is a platform for building large, sophisticated web sites. It provides editorial staff with a streamlined production environment in which they can concentrate on the production, editing and publishing of content within a predefined web site structure.

The definition and maintenance of the web site structure (and all the layout issues associated with it) is regarded as a completely separate concern, and is the subject of this manual.

The structure and layout of an Escenic web site is defined by a set of Escenic templates. The whole web site is generated "on demand" by merging a small number of templates with content retrieved from a database. An Escenic template is a JavaServer Pages (JSP) document, a file containing a mixture of HTML and JSP tags. The HTML tags define fixed layout elements, while the JSP tags represent dynamic elements that change according to the specific content requested.

In order to be a successful Escenic template developer, you need a general understanding of:

  • The Content Engine's architecture and object model

  • The web technologies on which the Content Engine relies