I'm not sure how to deploy best practice for SEO in a new project.

I'm building a CMS that will be used by a group of writers to post news articles to a website. I'm developing the site using Perl and Template-Toolkit (TT2). I've also embedded an open source editor (TinyMCE) in the system that will be used for content creation.

I was planning to save the news article content to the DB as text - though I could also save it to flat files and then save the corresponding file paths to the DB.

From an SEO standpoint, I think it would be very helpful if this content could be exposed to search engines. There will be lots of links and images that could help to improve rankings.

If I put this content in the DB, it won't be discoverable ... right?

If I save this content in template files (content.tt) will the .tt files be recognized by search engines?

Note that the template files (.tt) will be displayed as content via a TT2 wrapper.

I'm also planning to generate a Google XML Sitemap using the Sitemap 0.90 standard. Perhaps this is suffiecient? Or should I try to make the actual content discoverable?

Thanks ... just not sure how the google dance deals with .tt files and such.