Xslt is the CPU of an umbraco website. Umbraco stores
Content separately from the mechanics of
Presentation. Content is stored as Xml, in a series of
elements corresponding to the contents and their doctypes. Document
types (aka Content types) have properties. The content
documents are available as high-level nodes in the site Xml, and
their properties are defined and set there as well.
This All Just Means You Have An Excellently Marked-up Set of
Data Ready to Parse and Present
Xslt is the global standard for parsing (transforming) Xml. So,
umbraco uses the Xslt as a souped-up query/script language, ready
to return all News Iems or all Blog Posts, or all posted between
noon and 3pm or whatever.
Xslt and XPath Form A "Turing Complete" Language In and Of
Themselves
Xslt may be complete, but this list of features is not. Just
think of Xslt as, for the most part, fetching and displaying in
Html whatever bit of data is called for. For example, a
Template might want Xslt to take the nodeName (of whatever
document is being rendered) and form a <title> tag for the
<head> of the <html>.
Another way is in the Content section of the UI with a Richtext
Editor (TinyMCE3). Both Templates and edited content have an Insert
macro button available. This Macro calls the corresponding
Xslt, which could fetch and make a thumbnail of an image for the
content.
Content is comprised of Documents of a certain type. Documents
have templates (masterpages) to define the outline of the Html.
Both Content and Templates can insert Macros. Macros (typically)
call Xslt snippets to transform the current document xml (content)
into rendered content (with all the html tags and everything lined
up).
