How we use the Abivia Content Pattern Plugin in Website Development - Alan Langford

ACP started as a simple answer to a tedious problem: How do you manage a large number of similarly formatted articles combined with a client who wants to make frequent changes to how those articles appear on the site? There were templating solutions available to solve the first problem, but once the template was copied into an article, there was no way to change the template.ACP solves this problem by maintaining the template (which we call a pattern) independent of the data used to fill it in. Change the pattern, all articles that use that pattern change instantly. Since then, ACP has grown into a Swiss Army Knife for content, offering many of the features of content construction kits in a plugin, so that everything still runs in com_content with no new tables and no need for special template support. ACP is a tool built for people with a developer's approach to building sites. It's heavy on programming construsts and has no user interface. The purpose of this session is to illustrate both how to use it and some of its more powerful applications.