Today I was back in ATG developer training - in their Commerce course. Some of our time was spent looking at templates for category and product pages. This was something I’d been thinking of on my own, and it was good to see that my ideas were right on track.

Basically I had been thinking about templates on both the presentational as well as the content levels. The templates we looked at today were set at the content levels. That is, a particular template could be created to ensure consistency across pages, but there could be rules set up to support deviations from the standard. Elements are associated with a particular template, which would basically serve as the way to retrieve the specific properties of the element.

My second thought was to create a presentational template as well, to support how these elements should be displayed. A simple idea I gave a colleague would be that every product page would contain a description, a title and an image, but in some cases we may want the image to the left rather than the right. The underlying data would be the same, but we would want the presentation to be slightly different. (this could be applied even so simply as including a specific stylesheet)