[TYPO3] better way for template inheritance

[henri delebecque]

hello,

First, I should apologize if my question is trivial, but i'm rather a 
newbie in Typo3.

I have the following site structure, that seems very classical to me:
My site in structured into chapters, each one describing a part of 
the features offer.
For example, a chapter for the products, one for the services, for 
the support, and so on.

For each chapter I have two kind of templates. the first describes 
the whole chpater, and contents basically a short description (left 
column) and a list of links (in right column) to the pages that 
describe each element of this chapter (for example each product).

I have defined my typo3 pages following the structure bellow:
Site
  +------products (with the template that describe a product, used for 
every product sub-page)
  |                +---- product summary page (with the template that 
describe all the products)
  |                +----- first product (no template, inherits the 
template in "products")
  |                + ...
  |                +----- last product (same as the first)
  +------services (same templates, but customized for presenting the services)

The main advantage of this way of designing is that my product page 
authors can freely add new product pages, without the burden of 
assigning a template to each page. Moreover, the individual product 
template is highly factorized. The "products" page is only a template 
container, and the "product summary page" contains the chapter 
presentation stuff, and the template for displaying it. The product 
summary template only redefines the HTML page that has to be parsed 
by te automaketemplate extension I use for template generation.

Everything was fine until I realized that the "bread crumbs" (or 
rootline) doesn't work well when the user clicks on the "products" 
link, since it receives a page formatted using the individual product 
template, without content.

My second try was to include all the products subpages into an alias, 
named "products", that points to the presentation page, , to hide the 
real products page (to display a good rootline), keeping all other 
things constant. The problem, in this case, is that the "speaking 
url" (rewritten by realurl) for the first product page, was 
"site;domain.com/products/products/first_product...", which is not 
very pleasant :-)

Please, could you give me advice, or correct my design if I have made 
mistakes ?

Thanks a lot
Best regards

-- 
| Henri Delebecque (henri.delebecque at supelec.fr)
| Docteur en Sciences
| Professeur - Webmaster
| Tel :  33  (0)1.69.85.14.91
| Supelec
| 3 rue Joliot-Curie
| Plateau de Moulon
| Fax:  33 (0)1.69.85.12.34
| 91190 Gif sur Yvette
| FRANCE

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