Our organisation has a number of web sites and applications that are managed outside of Matrix that use different/outdated header and footer information.
Is there a way to export a design as something that could be included as part of a page wrapper?
Cheers
It would be possible to include that information dynamically using the remote content asset, however I wouldn't recommend it as it's not really the intended use of that asset type (read: Use at own risk, there could be caching/performance issues but entirely dependent on what you are remoting and how you are caching).
The other solution we have used in the past is to write a lightweight php script on the server that extracts the header/footer information and automatically populates an asset in Matrix that is nested into the design. The pros of this approach is that it will still work if the remote data is inaccessible for any reason (because the information ends up being stored in 2 locations), and also has no real performance impact. The cons are that the content is essentially managed outside the CMS and reliant on a script attached to a cron job to update.
I think the question is more the other way round (consuming parts of a matrix design in an external service).
In which case can you do Anthony's extract and cache suggestion in the external service?
We do this with a Java server.
Steve