Silenzio Musik, Germany The Frontier typical separation of form and content ... gave me great flexibility while designing the site

Martin Spernau describes the project: The 'Silenzio Musik' web-site was designed to be an online CD catalogue for the music-distributor 'Silenzio' in Germany. One of our main goals was to give the customer an opportunity to listen to audio-samples of every CD, together with all the relevant info about CD, titles and artist/composer.

As the site was built an is maintained by only one person (me), Frontier's flexibility is a great help. Each CD has a Frontier ODB object which stores the basic info like name, artist, catalogue no., price, titles/songs and the description. Each available sound-clip also has its entry in the ODB (there are currently about 300+ clips online). When Frontier renders the final page for the CD, a macro checks if there are sound-clips available for the CD in question and then builds the appropriate links to them. Another macro builds the HTML-FORM for our shopping-cart system, entering the price, cat. no., etc..

All the 'index' pages (giving the user an overview of the available CDs in one music category like 'World-Music') are completely automated by a macro that searches for all the CDs that have the appropriate #directive for the category and then adds them to the page, extracting info like CD name, cat. no and artist from the CD-page, building a link to the actual page of the CD.

The Frontier typical separation of form and content (CD data in ODB / templates & macros) gave me great flexibility while designing the site and the (Perl-)CGI shopping-cart system. Once the basic design was finished I can now focus on adding content and additional navigation, news-pages, search-facilities and such.