Database System

Using the Webvanta Database

The database stores all of the content for your site. Even your templates, CSS, and editable regions are stored in the database. That happens for you automatically, so you may think of these items as static content.

Blog posts, articles, and content regions are also stored in the database and require no setup on your part.

To realize the full power of the Webvanta system, however, you'll usually want to create other kinds of database items. There's two kinds of items:

• Knowledgebase items, which include links to other sites, books, and events
• Custom database items, which you define to include exactly the fields you need for your site's information

The Knowledgebase

Your Webvanta site comes with a pre-configured set of database features we call the Knowledgebase. The Knowledgebase is designed for storing the kind of information that goes in a typical "Resources" page or information portal site: links to other sites, books, events, and so forth.

The Knowledgebase setup includes a set of predefined pages that provide a complete, automated presentation system for you to start with and customize as you need. There's two versions:

• The Resources page, which is linked from the menu of a new site by default, provides a single-page summary of all the information in the database and is designed for use with smaller resource lists.
• For information portal sites, or business sites that want rich resources sections, the Category, List, and Item pages provide a powerful, turn-key solution.

These are just two of many possible ways to present the information from the Knowledgebase. You can use them as-is, customize as you'd like, or create your own pages to present information however you'd like. You have complete control: all of the code in the standard pages is fully exposed so you can edit it, and there's no restrictions on what you can create on your own.

Item Types

When you add an item to the database, you must first specify what type of item it is, since different information is required for different item types. The item type determines what information is stored, and how it is displayed.

Your site comes with a variety of standard item types already defined. Some item types have different fields and behavior. For example, an article (that is, one that is part of the site’s content) has an author name, an excerpt, a body, and a publication date, and the body can be arbitrarily long, while a book includes an ISBN number and its cover image, price, and other information are automatically fetched from Amazon.

There's two ways you can create item types with customized names or fields:

1. You can add a new Knowledgebase item type, which is really just a new name for the "link" type. This is useful if you want to organize your links in a more detailed way than the standard item types provide.
2. You can create fully custom types with any desired fields.

If you need to define the fields in your database items, then you create custom database items. Custom items are presented on the standard Knowledgebase pages, but those pages know nothing about whatever custom fields you have created. To display those fields, you must create custom pages to display them, using WebvantaScript, or modify the standard Knowledgebase pages.

See Building AllAboutPets: Part 4, A Custom Database for an example of setting up a custom database item type and its associated pages, and Creating Custom Item Types for details about custom item type options.

Categories

By selecting an item type and filling in the fields for that item, you’ve answered the question "what is it?". The next question is, "what's it about?"

Categories enable you to organize the content of the database by subject; they answer the "what's it about?" question. Categories are hierarchical and can be nested to any depth (sub-category, sub-sub-category, and so forth). An item can be assigned to any number of categories.

Categories are much like tags, except that they are hierarchical, and they use a controlled vocabulary (that is, a predefined set of terms, defined by the site administrator).

One advantage of hierarchical categories is that content can be automatically aggregated from sub-categories. So if you have a category for birds, and sub-categories for raptors, waterbirds, and songbirds, you can assign all the content that is specific to one type of birds to the appropriate sub-category, and your birds Category page will automatically show content for all types of birds.

See Setting Up Your Database Structure for more details on defining your categories.

Standard Knowledgebase Pages

Category Pages

For each category, a Category Page is automatically created. (Technically, there is only one Category page; but it is accessed with a URL that includes the ID of the category, which tells it which category's content to use.) The standard Category Page includes the topic description at the top; a center section that highlights articles on that topic; and a list of other database items on that topic below that.

The contents of a Category Page includes items that are associated with the current category and all its sub-categories.

List Pages

List pages show all the items of a chosen category and Item Type. Either of those can also be null. If both are null, then the entire database contents is listed. If the category is null, but the Item Type is set, then all items of that Item Type are listed, regardless of category, and vice versa.

The standard set of Knowledgebase pages includes a List page for each combination of Item Type and category. (As with all Knowledgebase pages, there is really just one List page, whose URL can include both category and item type parameters that determine what information is displayd.) These lists are accessed via the “More…” links on the Category Page; since the Topic page shows only the top items of each type, the List pages are needed to provide access to the entire set of contents for that category.

Item Pages

The Knowledgebase provides an Item page for every item. The Item page includes:

• All the information about the item in the database, including the title, link, and description.
• A place for visitors to add comments on each item, and view the existing comments.
• Links to related items in the database.

Customizing the Knowledgebase Pages

You can modify these pages to provide whatever HTML markup you want, and to filter, sort, and display the information to meet your needs. You can also modify all the CSS styles that control the appearance.

See Styling Knowledgebase Pages for more information on customizing these pages.