Site structure and inheritance

All sites are made of a collection of pages, arranged in a tree structure.

Why is this important?

• Enabling easy organisation of any quantity of sections and pages.
• Easy to set up a consistent look using inheritance.
• Saves time - and money - in making changes over the lifetime of the site.

A key architectural feature of the system is that all the pages in the site are logically arranged in a tree-like hierarchy. This may not be visibly apparent to the site visitor (the appearance of the site is totally under your control), but the hierarchical structure helps you manage the style, behavior and permissions throughout the site in a logical manner and without having to duplicate any work.

For example, if you wanted all the pages within a certain section of the site to all have the same background color, you can set this in one place in the containing section, and the system will ensure any existing pages, plus any that are added later, all get the correct color. And if a page is moved out of that section and into one that calls for a different color, the color is changed automatically.

The inheritance rules of a section of the site are  set in the Behavior Editor for the head Section of that branch of the site tree.

Inheritance is set on a per Component basis - in the Behavior Editor of the Head section you will see an entry for each Component type within that section. Each Component type is set independently of each other. As Components are added to a section they automatically assume - inherit - the Style and Setting of the head Section.

Changes the Style or Settings in the head Section will be inherited by existing components below unless the lower component has has manual changes already made, in which case these individual settings are honored.