If you want to build a large sized Lotus Domino application and you want it to be maintainable, understandable, expandable, functional, and simple, then you must use clear plastic crates. More specifically, you have to put work into making the whole Lotus Domino application fit together smoothly. You have to try hard to make everything as consistent as possible, and you have to try to simplify, wherever possible. Make it simple, simple, simple. The simpler your solution is, the less likely there are to be errors and the easier it will be for you or anyone else to understand.

You want to be able to go inside the application and quickly and easily see how things fit together and make modifications that won't break the rest of the system. You need consistent naming conventions for all database design elements including forms, views, agents, subforms, whatever. More importantly, you need to put a great deal of thought into the underlying structure of the Lotus Domino documents that will be stored in the database. Again, make it simple. Look for ways that you can make things more generic. Be consistent. Label everything clearly.

It takes a lot of work to maintain such consistency, and it takes even more work to establish consistency in an existing Domino database. The rewards are huge, however, especially if it's an application that you'll be spending a lot of time working within. You'll find that changes and fixes take much less time to implement, major new functions and features can be easily implemented, bugs and errors will take much less time to track down, and the new programmer in your department will be able to come up to speed on the application in much less time. Just like the crates, make the source and structure of your application transparent, easy to move around, easy to stack, and nice to look at.

Content administration
This month we're going to be taking an overview snapshot of the Lotus Domino based content administration portion of the content management system. Specifically, we'll be looking at the Lotus Domino documents that are stored in the content management system's database.

The good news is that there are only four different types of Lotus Domino documents stored in the database. The fact that there are only four different types of documents points to a very committed effort to reduce complexity and to make things as generic as possible. The four documents are:

• Content document: this is an individual "page" within the Web site;

• Menu document: each menu item has one document;

• Text properties document: a set of font, size, style, and color definitions for each page element such as headline, body text, footer, etc.;

• Site configuration document: contains global settings to be applied across the entire site, such as the background image, the home page, the default global text properties scheme, the default logo, etc.