Essential concepts
This section contains some essential concepts that you should understand before starting work with Tridion Docs as an author, editor, contributor or reviewer of content.
- The repository
The repository is at the core of the Tridion Docs content management system. It is the overall container, a database, in which you store, organize and manage all the content for an implementation of Tridion Docs. - Objects
Each Draft Space document is made of individual objects that are stored in the Content Manager repository. - Topics
A topic is intended to represent an independent, logical unit of information, which can be separately created, stored, managed, distributed and reused. Topics come in different types. This has a direct impact on what you can write and how you can write your content. - Maps
A map defines the logical order and the hierarchical relations of the topics it contains. - Publications
A publication is a compilation of independent, version-controlled objects from the Content Manager repository, which is combined with additional information that determines how the content should be assembled and published. A publication exists in the repository as a Publication object and is the one object that contains all the other objects making up a given deliverable. - Folders
All content in the Content Manager repository is stored in folders. When creating a folder, you define the type of content that it can contain. Content Manager does not use the location of an XML object for addressing or linking so the folders are for your convenience only for organizing, storing, and locating objects. - Conditions and conditional content
Use of conditional content is a powerful technique supporting content reuse. It enables the same objects to be reused across various publications and contexts rather than constricting these objects to a specific publication and context. Apply conditions to context-specific content and then show that content only when the conditions are met, as set in the publication's context. - Variables
Variables are placeholders inside your XML documents which are replaced by a text string or graphic at publishing time. - Version management
Version management in Tridion Docs helps you to effectively manage the content life cycle. When you need to maintain a snapshot in time of the object while continuing to make additional changes, you can explicitly create new version or branch of the object. Incremental revisions track changes between versions. - Workflow
The workflow for an object identifies the states and transitions an object can have, the order in which the object must pass through the states, and the roles that can transition it. You must specify a workflow for each object that is tracked in the repository. - Modular writing best practices
With Draft Space, you write your content inside topics, that makes it optimized for reuse. That modular way of writing requires some change of habits compared to classical writing.