Specifying the output mode

There are several ways to specify the output mode for Sitellite to use for any given visitor to your web site.  We've already seen one above, and there are two more as well.

The first way, seen above, is to specify the output mode explicitly via the mode parameter in the URL.  This will set the current output mode to whatever you specify, for that page request only.  Another trick is that you can specify the output mode in search engine friendly format as well, in two ways:

http://www.yourWebSite.com/index/about_us/mode.docbook

http://www.yourWebSite.com/index/about_us/docbook

If no explicit mode is declared via ?mode=docbook, and there is a second unnamed parameter passed to Sitellite (as in, without the "mode." part of it), Sitellite assumes this is the output mode value, in the same way that Sitellite assumes the first one is the page ID.

The second method of specifying the output mode is to use the setMode parameter in the URL, in which case the current output mode is switched to whatever you specify, but the default output mode for that visitor, until you give it a new setMode value, is set to what you specify.  For example:

http://www.yourWebSite.com/index?setMode=docbook

Please note that setMode is case-sensitive.

The third way, which is indirectly affected by setMode, is to set the "output_mode" session variable of the current visitor to the output mode of your choice.  This can be done very easily with the following PHP code:

<?php

session_set ('output_mode', 'docbook');

?>

To find out the current output mode, however, you should not use session_get(), but instead use $cgi->mode, which will have the value in all cases, even if you haven't specified it in your URL.  For example:

<?php

global $cgi;

echo 'The current output mode is: ' . $cgi->mode;

?>

Conclusion

This is just a taste of what Sitellite has to offer as a content publishing system.  The Sitellite Content Server, one of the components of the overall CMS system, is a full-featured content publishing environment, featuring personalization capabilities, automatic access control, an application loader with as much or more flexibility than equivalent Java servers, built-in multi-level performance caching, plus access to the rest of Sitellite, including the CMS and the huge API library.

Page 1: Despite Sitellite having a very ...
Page 2: Creating a new output mode
Page 3: Specifying the output mode

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