This is part of a continuing discusson on the four distinct functional aspects of GATE Village's technical infrastructure.

GATE Village is built by experts for experts ... while we strongly believe in providing a useful and effective site for the novice, it is the expert and those striving to be experts that truly benefit from the power of GATE Village. GATE Village is a managed application, unlike traditional ISP-driven web site creation tools, even an expert member creating a new web site or community within GATE Village does not have overall administrative access to the Village, rather they build from an existing suite of functionality the Village offers.

So, for instance, when an authorized member wishes to create a new content type, they can do so via /admin/content/types/add where they have access to dozens of pre-existing CCK fields as well as the ability to create their own fields from dozens of pre-existing data types (with more being added as requested by and/or found useful to members). Thus, something that is as complex as the example Confidential Client Form can be created in minutes. (NOTE: you will need to login or create an acount to access that URL).

That form provides for uploading and cropping of an image, validation of phone numbers, Canadian Social Insurance Numbers, cross-referencing with other "Confidnetial Client Forms", the guarantee of uniqueness so that each user can only enter one form per client, and even a place to put confidential information about the client -- all in fields that can be made private, be hidden from normal view, or (as in this example case) made public for all to see.

That form, like virtually all GATE Village pages, also sets the page title, adds a human readable URL, sets keywords and other meta tags. And, of course, it stores all the values in the database allowing it to be used and referenced elsewhere in the Village (by authorized personnel only).

All of that and it took approximately 2 hours to fully complete the brand-new, example content type. But as impressive as that is, it is still too long for a real expert. Thus we provide the ability to export existing content types and import new ones. You can see the results of that export in the attached file. An expert can easily take such an export and adjust it to their liking (with dropped fields, added and modified fields) thus taking the creation time down to a mere matter of minutes.