Pages are the basic building blocks of almost all websites. Clearly, not all pages in a website share the same structure; however, pages can be codified by type (e.g., home, contact, details, etc.). Each type of page shares the same basic structure. These structures are represented by schemas. Schemas are templates that define what content can and cannot display within each content type and the order of the various pieces of content within each type. Schemas do not dictate how content appears on a page; rather, they only contain information about structure. Ingeniux CMS uses schemas to describe a highly-structured document format called the Extensible Markup Language (XML).

Your organization may use a formal document (e.g., Site Specification) as a blueprint for schema implementation. Alternately, your team may have other ways of capturing schema design considerations, which are driven by your organization's business requirements.

Developers use these organizational documents to create XML schemas (templates) for each page type of the website. Ingeniux CMS has a built-in tool for this purpose called Schema Designer. When content contributors create a new page within the CMS, they select one of the page types that have been configured by an administrator in Schema Designer. Because authoring in XML would require a specialized skill set, Ingeniux CMS relieves contributors from having to know any details about XML when they enter content. These identifiers help to track pages within the CMS. For example, typing "Home" into the Title text element of a page's Edit tab populates the Title element in the XML view:

<title type="string" label="Page Title">Home</title>

Once edited, each new page is stored as an XML file and allocated a unique identifier (xID). You can view the page XML from within the CMS by clicking Site > XML tab in the CMS. This view is read-only, as the XML cannot be altered directly. The CMS packages these XML files, and other meta files, and then pushes them to a delivery system such as the Dynamic Site Server (DSS).

For developers, it's important to understand the flow from the XML schema design to schema configuration to page creation and to the XML that is deployed and rendered as HTML on an external system, such as the DSS.