This post is part of a series, this being the second part, if
you're interested,
read the first part here.
As in every Umbraco project, the first thing to do is set up the
Document Types, as they are the containers for data.
Since Umbraco supports inheritance through Master Document
Types, I set mine up so that they reflect the different kinds of
content available for users (beside the types needed for the UI).
My base type is called ContentRegion, it has properties for size
and position. Inheriting from ContentRegion is ColoredRegion, with
properties for colors, it then in turn has different regions
inheriting from it, like FormattedTextRegion and SimpleTextRegion,
where the formatted region is a HTML editor, and the simple one is
just a text string.
There's also an ImageRegion, with the derived types Image and
Upload, where Image is the templated version used by editors, and
Upload enables end-users to upload their own content for inclusion
in the final PDF. Finally, I created a SelectiveRegion type, that
has no content of its own, but will enable end-users to select a
child to use and edit.
Editors create "templates" of materials, by specifying the size
and position of different regions on a page, the hierarchy
determines the order, or z-index, that the regions are rendered,
enabling overlapping and covering, if desired.
This makes it fairly easy to create and edit templates, enabling
editors to create multiple types of content that end-users can edit
and output as pdf's.
Next up:
Getting the data to the end-user