CMS, blog and shopping cart integration

[tjc]

Placeholders are a workaround for use with Xara and really are a poor way of obtaining CMS functionality. Their great weakness is that they are fixed in size and cannot expand and contract according to the size of the content within them. Normally CMS templates are written using CSS rules that accommodate variable content. This makes Xara a very poor solution for CMS integration. There is an expectation that HTML templates will be produced in a specific way and Xara is very poor at handling content that isn't available at design time.

I don't think Sitegrinder has any relevance to Xaras suitability for CMS integration.

Before anyone else points out that many Xara users are currently using a CMS in conjunction with Xara, I would say, "yes, I know". The problem is that the integration is entirely reliant on placeholders punching"holes" in the Xara page for population by the CMS and that only works for fairly simple scenarios and is not satisfactory for anything that involves much content.

Hence why I only mention enhancing the placeholder editor.

SiteGrinder is an identical workflow and used by all the big sellers and contractors..not sure how it's not "relevant" in this comparison. All the APIs do from these systems is output and process data..This is why you can z-index or absolute and get identical yet faster results with xara.

It doesn't effect me at all if they ignore nuances and user requests..I'm already doing all this 'impossible' stuff in minutes.. I can even export PSD and do flash UIs in Catalyst..the 'impossible' stuff is nice.

Is it really so much to ask for a better placeholder editor?

[teonieuwlande]

The tweaksets of Xara allows perfectly for changing CMS content length, the placeholders do perfectly for putting the CMS parts into a template designed with Xara. As with for example freewebshop.

Maybe some of the folks asking for a CMS forget that those CMS and shopping cart scripts are based on PHP, which as far as I know would blow the preview in Xara Web Designer.

Maybe wrong idea, maybe very off topic but IMHO Xara would be enhanced a lot if instead of applying PHP based solutions, support for PHP would be added. That would integrate debugging and running scripts into the product. There are enough solutions for PHP support. After that, all options for CMS, webshop, blog and etc. support would be logical next step.