[opencms-dev] Getting started

[l.bolzani at agora.it]

Hi,
I'm new to opencms and I'm trying to understand how to use it for my app.

Here is a brief description (not in opencms terms).
I have some document types (news, docs, msgs, ecc.). Each of these has some
common metadata (es. author) and some specific (es. expire date).
Some of these metadata are optional, some are required.
In some cases the metadata contains more than a brief text and could contain
some formatting (es. the abstract of a doc): it is more like a content body
structured in several sections than a metadata.

Now in opencms I have seen file types, pages, bodies and templates. Which one is
most similar to my "document type"?
One that has some associated properties is the file type: does make sense to
define a News file type, a Msg file type, ecc.?

For the "structured body" I think I could define some default_bodies with
precompiled text (es. "Insert here the abstract") and hope the writer will keep
the structure during editing. Is there a better way?

There are the properties, that looks similar to what I called metadata, but I've
seen no way to add some kind of validator for the value. Which classes should I
start to look at (I think the CmsResourceType).

Thanks for any hints or ideas 


Bye

Lorenzo