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Tridion, Forms, and Interaction

1-Dec-2009

Tags: Web Content Management, Tridion 2011

A press release was sent to me today with the title "SDL Tridion Puts Online Forms at the Heart of Interaction." Which made me smile, in a nostalgic sort of way.

Nowadays, when we discuss interaction, we tend to quickly drift off to social media, networking, or collaboration. How do you deal with those bidirectional (or rather, multidirectional) streams of interacting content? Is a Web CMS really suited for this, especially those (like Tridion) that emphasize "publishing to" a delivery tier (in other words, pushing out the content like a fire-and-forget thing)? It's not something you can reduce to "here's the form, so there's your interaction."

For sure, web forms are often more important (and more complex) than you'd think at first glance. However, the Tridion module doesn't actually process the form content, store it, or create a workflow around it. It just allows you to create the forms themselves, "to manipulate the form as if it were just another type of web content." Useful as that may be, it's quite different from actually managing the interaction.

So if web forms are at the heart of Tridion's interaction, as the company's marketing suggests, that's a bit like Kafka 2.0. At least now, you can send in really pretty forms. In triplicate.

    Excerpt from the Tridion 2011 Evaluation

    Web Content Management Report looks at... Site Search with Tridion

    "You should note that Tridion's delivery tier doesn't support search out of the box. You will have to add a third-party solution. This can be problematic, since most search engines likely only will collect the content by crawling the resulting site. The highly componentized nature of Tridion sites has been known to trip up..."
    (p. 383)

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