Structure of the page through parsys vs fixed components - CQ

Question

For pages like product details, there is a fixed structure of the content like product image, description etc. Now if there is parsys component used (widely used in geometrixx demo site), there will be possibility to add the any of the allowed components in any order in parsys. Will not this create content chaos ? OR it will be author's responsibility to add it as needed by page structure ?

Answer 1

Either it is the responsibility of the authors/publisher, which can be controlled through workflows or you would have to create a fixed product detail page component where each component in it is fixed in your jsp and no parsys is available.

Answer 2

With each parsys, a user with sufficient permissions can edit the design mode and set which components are allowed to be used in a particular parsys. So another alternative is to stucture a page with several different parsys elements, with each parsys having a different set of allowed components. That allows you to enforce some structure, but still gives flexibility (for example if you want the order of the elements to be consistent when the element is present, but still allow some elements to be optional; or if you want to allow multiple instances of elements and still preserve some structure).

If the structure is totally fixed, then embedding other components into JSP of your component will make it fixed. For these embedded components, you may want to consider setting the edit mode actions to prevent users from deleting fixed components, for example. If you need the component to be embedded in one case but usable in a parsys in another, you might consider creating two components (with a shared super type) so you can set different edit mode restrictions.