• Phenotype works page oriented
• Every page can have one (or none) layout with two independent views (normal, print/ajax and xml)
• The content of pages is managed with page components, like playing with building bricks
• Pages are combined in groups, representing different realms, domains, languages … of your site
• Pages can have multiple versions and languages

Phenotype uses the most understandable metaphor for describing websites: Pages.

This enables the editor to navigate through the backend very intuitively:

Each page gets a unique ID, a consistent URL and becomes part of the backend rights system, so you can define, who can edit the content of a page and who not.

That page content is edited by inserting and combining page components, like playing with building bricks.

Every Phenotype application will have it’s own page components, e.g. a richtext component, an image component, a product teaser component ….

There’s one special component to insert dynamic functionalites (so-called Includes), like displayment of news articles, galleries, integration of votes or annotation possibilities, essentially everything you can think of.

All pages are always dynamic, meaning they can be reactive to request and session. Nevertheless Phenotype offers various possibilites to cache partial or whole pages to keep the load (execution time and memory usage) of a page as little as possible.

Every page is allocated to a Layout. A Layout is more than just a (Smarty) template.

Within a layout the editable spots are defined and basic functionalities (Includes) are set. Typical basic functionalities within a layout are navigation elements (menus, breadcrumb, traces), newsboxes, shopping carts and so on.

A typical Phenotype web application has only few layouts, since dynamic content is realized by Includes.

Learn more about Layouts

As written above the content of a page is edited due to placement of page components. The most powerfull component is the richtext component. You may manage a whole website by just putting one richtext component on every page.

But usally you develop custom components for multiple purposes, e.g. images, richtext, special content (team profiles, product details), galleries, content syndication, teaser, news, votes, charts, videos, flash elements, whatever you can think of…

More infos on page components here.

Pages are combined in so-called page groups. That is to help you organizing complex sites.

This can be very usefull, if you have to build multi-language or multi-domain applications, or if you have to deliver to special plattforms (e.g. mobile devices). Since the group of page is a property accessible by it’s functional components (like includes or page components) you can build one component for a distinct purpose, which reacts different, depending on the page group of the containing page.

Every page can have versions of it’s own.

The main purpose of this feature is to edit future versions of a page. A new version can be activated manually or by an automatism. So you can e.g. prepare days in advance a special new years eve version of your homepage.

You just read, that every page can have differential versions. Additionaly to that, every page can exist in many languages at the same time. You just have to configure your page group to be multi-lingual.

Now you can go into details on page components or skip that for a start an read more about dynamic pages.