Re: Basic skeletal intro to Xaraya concepts

Jason Judge wrote:

> Have you explored the demo site: http://demo.xaraya.com/ ? That site
> basically gives you what you would get from a fresh installation. It may not
> explain any of concepts, but it is a good way of exploring them.

No I haven't looked. But I have successfully installed it on my own 
server and have been looking at it for three days now. Making little 
progress with the documentation (great for people who ALREADY know what 
the parts of Xaraya do) I decided it was time for me to call for help...

As I mentioned, I don't know what anything means.

It looks like Xaraya is object oriented and modules are different from 
PostNuke. Where (on PostNuke) they were previously independent programs 
for doing things, you can now use functions from them to do other 
things. I think these functions are called Hooks. But I don't know 
where/what can use these functions. From the interview with John Cox, 
I'm guessing that it has something to do with adding two templates and a 
publication type. But I don't know what templates or publication types 
are or do. There is a tutorial on how to use them, but I don't 
understand what is going on when I follow the tutorial (which I followed).

There needs to be a very BASIC explanation of what the parts are and how 
they interact. As I said earlier, I'll help bash the answers into some 
kind of brief document for inclusion.


Tell you what, I'll give you some questions and lets see if someone can 
answer them:


1 What are the basic bulding blocks of Xaraya? How do they interopperate?

2 What is a Template?

3 What is a Publication Type?

4 Are Templates and Publication Types related? How?

5 How are artilces sorted into sections/catagores/topics?

6 How, and by what, are articles displayed?

7 What do Catagories do? Are they the only way of sorting articles or 
just an example?

8 Do articles need to be sorted into a simple heirarchy or can they be 
sorted into a multidimensional aray with each article fitting into 
several independent heirarchies simultaneously or using catagory flags 
instead of a heirarchy at all?

9 Are there any other basics I need to know about?


Armed with answers to these 9 questions I think I (and others) would be 
able to start making sense of the rest of the documentation :-)
Thanks for bearing with me on this!

It looks like a brilliant program. I hope with a little help from you 
guys I can assist in making your great work more accessable to new 
people :-)

SpiritTech