A Tridion schema is used to define both the content and meta data fields for a certain type of content (=component in Tridion Lingo). It is an XML Schema which can be generated from the Tridion GUI. Not all options available in XML Schema are available from the GUI. However it is possible to use most XML schema functionality by manually editing the XML Schema.
An example could be the following schema for a news article:
- Fields
- Title
- Body
- Keywords
- Description
- Meta data fields
- Source
- Publish date
- Alias
The difference between meta data and normal fields is simple: meta data fields are published to the broker DB to the “custom metadata Table” content fields are not. The advantage is that you can query the metadatatable for specific content (i.e. select the last 5 news articles).
Security can be applied to give specific users the right to create news articles and deny it to others.
Additional links:
www.TridionTutorials.com: Schema (site down since 10-2008)