Forums / Cotonti / Core Labs / Archive / Core AJAX support

The modern Web 2.0 tendencies require that more and more actions on site can be performed without reloading the page: navigating between pages, sending forms and viewing results.

On the other hand, most of websites must be easy to crawl for a search engine. And some users have JavaScript switched off for security. So it is also a must to have a normal, synchronous requests available for them.

Combining both, CMS architects have come up to the idea of duality in CMS behavior, so that there are 2 methods to get the same page: in a traditional full-HTML way and in AJAX contents-only. Of course, it requires much more changes on a client side and the changes are not so dramatic in the core.

Implementing this feature in Seditio-N contains 3 parts:
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Adding the appropriate logical switches and layout control, depending on presence of AJAX flag in script parameters, in the core PHP scripts.

Providing strong core JavaScript API for this AJAX feature (using jQuery).

Making skins with support of this feature, utilizing the API.

As Seditio layout templates are not XML-based and all the generated output is (X)HTML, such formats as XML or JSON would require massive changes of all the existing code to support AJAX. That is why I think the output format should stay the same (XHTML), what's different is that the core invokes and returns only those parts of the page which are expected to change.

I would call this feature experimental and I'm going to implement it on a live site first during November and then merge a working version of it into the core.

And now let the brainstorm begin.