Spring's Mojo is XSLT

Sunday, November 27, 2005

I'm really digging this CMS. At its heart it serves up your data as XML and you apply XSL templates. And right there is a freedom you don't find in many content management systems. Most CMS are, as Adrian says, 'tag soup'. You make html templates and embed propriatry tags to pull out your content in predefined ways. By serving up XML, Spring allows you to do anything you like via XSLT. Here's a simple example.

The default blog listing template pulls out a field called 'description' for display on the home page, it's a metadata field that's also used for Dublin Core stuff and so on. I didn't want to do use that so I made a simple change to the template:

From this:

<xsl:value-of select="xml/pagexml/description" />

to this:

<xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="string(html/p[@class='summary'])">
        <xsl:copy-of select="html/p[@class='summary']"/>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
        <p class="summary">
            <xsl:value-of select="xml/pagexml/description" />
        </p>
    </xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

Which first checks to see if there's a <p> element in my page's html with a class of 'summary', and if so it'll copy it into the home page listing, otherwise it'll just use the description field.

It may not seem significant at face value, but look at what I was just able to do:

• Create my own semantic element
• Manipulate it in my template

How many CMS application let you do that eh? Here's another more advanced example from the man himself.

Random outings from a chaotic mind