anupambaksi 11:56 am on January 27, 2016
Tags: DD4T Estimation   

Considering Points for DD4T based Applications

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Considering Points for DD4T based application using Tridion version?? (2013 /Web 8)

Assuming Webpage is the final outcome, Items used in the page could be of three types:

  1. Individual Items (Component Views mainly)
  2. Shared Items (Page views / Navigation Items)
  3. CME TBBs / Extensions (TBBs / Content / Templates/ Schemas)
  4. Any external app??

Complexity could be of four types: Simple, Medium, Complex and Very Complex.

dd4t_complexity

Following are the considering points to define the Complexity of items:

  1. How many type of Page customer has or want to have? This will lead to no of page views – Simple / Medium
  • Page views hold overall layout (html), Section discrimination is done here
  • Has reference to your base layout, script bundles, header, breadcrumb, left navigation, content template (CTs), footer etc.
  • How many component views are rendered/supported in each page view?
  1. Component Views are content with business logic – Complex / Very Complex
  • Site Edit Feature (XPM) enabled for all content from Tridion (needs blueprint and schemas to be designed first to determine what can be put in CM)
  • Amount of Content, Helper methods (if any) for rendering contents (RTF, Link components/ Dynamic Component/ Broker service call)
  • Service / DB (customer/broker) calls, mapping (business logic??)
  • Partial views (based on business logic) to be designed for each Component
  1. Navigations Items – Complex
  • TBBs in CM end (navigation xml / sitemap xml), Logic in Web app end to render the content from broker and create the navigation (any custom business logic in navigation better to be handled in CD end if using DD4T)
  • Design and Development of all navigations items
  • Pre login / Post login navigations same or different (if applicable)
  1. Any OOB Feature (CM /CD End) – Very Complex
  1. Front end HTML design – Based on your expertise and size
  • Html 5 / Bootstrap / or any?
  • JQuery / Data table / Scripts/ Flash/ Validations (forms or any)?
  • Style classes (How much and what type of)?
  1. Multi-Channel Support – What are devices to be supported?
  • Device specific html / views? This will be challenging but easy to manage
  • Same views rendered in different devices (Code / Html/Styles) customization? Easy to design but difficult to maintain

Apart from these things to be considered are:

  1. No Of pages (Page views/component views), Amount of content to be shown in each page (no of Component and Schemas)
  2. Multi language / Multi device support?
  3. Existing Site or new? (If existing scope for reusing business logic code or validations or look and feel??)
  4. Team’s strength/knowledge on the technologies/tools will be used

download**If Using SDL Web 8, see the new features can be included or not (Topology manager, Business Process types, Discovery and Content Interaction services etc.), it is mostly supported with the framework DXA (more or less same as of DD4T 2.0) for both Java and .Net.

Hope this helps you identify complexities for each and every module for designing the website using DD4T with some modifications, this helped me in projects estimation phase. Any suggestions are mostly welcome !!