Folders in Tridion

Owned by Mark Albis
Last updated: Mar 19, 2021 by Zachary Restifo
3 min read

There are two main Folders in which Tridion work is done:

  1. Building Blocks: Where all website content (in the form of ) is built and saved.

  2. Root: Where the and are saved and content from the Building Blocks folder is added to them.

The following instructions provide an introduction to the Building Blocks and Root folders in Tridion.

 

Table of Contents

 

Building Blocks

The Building Blocks folder is where all website content, in the form of components, is built and saved. It houses all of the content which exists on the pages of your site. All content for a publication lives within its associated Building Blocks folder, with the exception of child publications, where content lives in the parent publication's Building Blocks folder.

In Tridion, an individual piece of content is referred to as a component.

  • Components provide ready-made templates for displaying content (such as text, images, video, etc.) on the pages of your site. (For more information about Components, please see these instructions: )

  • All components are built in the Building Blocks folder.

Within the Building Blocks folder, components are saved in the Content folder. Generally, within the Content folder there will be additional yellow component folders which mirror how your site's pages are organized.

  • For example, components which will be used for pages in the Research section of your site should be saved in a folder titled "Research."

  • Copying the navigation structure of your website will help you find components faster when adding them to pages.

For websites which have a parent publication (labelled with - (1)) all components should be created in the parent publication.

Cardiovascular Medicine is part of the IntMed group in Tridion. If I wanted to build components for Cardiovascular Medicine, I would select Building Blocks, then Content, then Cardiovascular Medicine to ensure that components are built in the right folders. Notice how in the Cardiovascular Medicine folder, the other folders are appropriately named after sections in the site (About Us, Clinical Programs, etc).

 

Root

The pink folders, or structure groups, represent the navigation structure of the website. After building components in the Building Blocks folder, components are placed on pages within the root folder.

  • Think of pages as blank canvases which you fill with content by adding components. This process will be covered in further detail in the following sections.

For more information on structure groups and pages in Tridion, visit these instructions:

 

This is the Root folder of Cardiovascular Medicine. Root folders are found below the Building Blocks folder. The home page is correctly labeled as "010_Home," and the remaining structure groups are numbered in order to dictate how they will appear in the top navigation.

 

On the first level within the Root, the home page will be built and labeled as 000_Home. The 000_Home page represents the very top of the site's navigation structure.

The pink folders with ###_ prefixes are called structure groups.

  • Structure groups in the top level of the Root folder, where the homepage is, will become the main navigation which displays at the top of the site.

  • For example, if a structure group is named 010_About Us, “About Us” will be the first section listed in the top navigation.

Within each pink folder or structure group, there is at least one page. There may also be additional structure groups and pages with ###_ prefixes that represent the left navigation for the website while you are within that specific structure group.

Each structure group, in addition to having a name and numerical prefix, has a file name.

  • The file name will determine the name of the folder within the URL. Since the file name will become part of a URL, it can only contain lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens (-), and underscores (_).