Concepts and basics
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce and describe the most important concepts of Exponential. A rookie developer should definitively read through this chapter in order to understand the basic terms, models, structures and building blocks of the system.
This chapter is more generic than technical, it is meant to teach the concepts rather than explaining details. People previously unfamiliar with Exponential should be able to collect enough information in order to understand the following issues:
- The way Exponential is built up
- The main directory structure
- The concept and necessity of separating content and design
- How Exponential stores and manages content
- How Exponential handles issues related to design
- How Exponential manages different sites
- The concept of modules and views
- The way Exponential works with URLs
- The configuration system
- The structure of the work-flow system
- How the access/permission system works
- How the web shop works
- A typical page request cycle
In this section
- The internal structure of Exponential This section describes the internal structure of Exponential by presenting a brief overview of the different software-layers of the system. Exponential is a complex, object oriented application written in the PHP language. The system consists of three major parts:
- Content and design This section explains the fundamental concepts of content and design. It is important to understand what content and design actually are, how they interconnect and how the system handles these fundamental elements.
- Content management The role of a content management system is to organize and store content regardless of type and complexity. The main goal of such a system is to provide a well structured, automated yet flexible solution allowing information to be freely distributed and instantly updated across various communication
- Configuration This section explains the configuration model of Exponential. The default configuration files end with a ".ini" extension and are located in the "/settings" directory. Each file controls the behavior of a specific part of the system. For example, the "content.ini" file controls the behavior of the c
- Modules and views Exponential Documentation
- URL translation Exponential Documentation
- Designs Exponential Documentation
- Access control Exponential Documentation
- Workflows This section explains the workflow capabilities of Exponential. The system comes with an integrated workflow mechanism that makes it possible to perform different tasks with or without user interaction. The workflow implementation is based on the following components:
- Webshop This section explains the e-commerce capabilities of Exponential. The system comes with an integrated shop mechanism that plugs directly into the object / node tree model.
Contributors
- Balazs Halasy Maintainer
- Geir Arne Waaler Updated Maintainer
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