Designing Component visualization as part of the page visualization

In some cases, you may want to make the visualization of Components dependent on the specific page on which they occur. For example, if your various types of Pages use different color schemes (e.g. there is a 'blue page' type and a 'green page' type), you may want your Component to follow this visualization (make it blue on a blue page, and green on a green page).

In this case, the Component design is an integral part of the page and it is pointless to separate one from the other. The Component Template for this type of Component should produce an unvisualized Component, and the Adobe Dreamweaver Template for the page should only contain the Component design: that is, it should contain no optional regions, and no call to RenderComponentPresentation().

Please note the following drawbacks of this approach:

  • Page authors can no longer specify how a Component is visualized: you ignore the Component Template they select when they add a Component Presentation to a Page. (Because of this, consider instructing them to select a dummy Component Template, such as the Default Component Template.)
  • The rendered Component is no longer identifiable as a separate entity, which means that a Component link in Content Manager cannot result in a hyperlink to this rendered Component.
  • The rendered Component can no longer be stored separately on the Content Delivery server. If the Component occurs on many different Pages, this means that a change in the Component results in the republishing of those Pages, which may slow down publishing.