I am planning a site which has to have a very low edit rate so am trying to make as much reusable content as possible. I am looking for some advice on how others approach this.

I want to take a content section say on Pets->Dogs
For each dog page it will have a main picture and text - inline editing

My aim is to reuse the page for the homepage slider using a page list block for a custom carousel.

However, the text in the carousel wont appear on the actual dog page - only on the dog slide of the carousel.

So I know I can do this with attributes on the dog page (eg custom text attribute) and fetch the value in my pagelist override template. Easy bit.

What I can figure out how to do neatly is
a) Make this attribute required so the editor cannot forget to add it and break their carousel/slide show - going to the properties window is counter-intuitive

b) whether it is best to have a separate image attribute for the carousel or to try to reuse the page image (block) from the dog page on the homepage

I can see that the dogs carousel info could be edited as part of the dog page type but just not shown on the dog page only the carousel. This way the editor can edit everything without accessing the page properties. But I am not sure this is any better or worse from a UX point of view, or from a developers point of view in using the system.

Any thoughts welcome.