Re: Best Content Management METHOD...

> From: Monty <monty3@hotmail.com> > > I'm setting up a simple content-management system for a webzine. I'm not > sure which method would be the most efficient: > > 1) Put all content in a database and dynamically flow content into a few > different "article" template files. > > Or... > > 2) Build the content as actual pages with dynamic elements for menus, and > store only basic info about each article in CMS database (such as title, > publish date, writer, keywords, etc.). > > Option 1 would make it very easy to modify the look of all articles, but, > I'm concerned that using just a few templates for all articles would slow > down the site if lots of people are simultaneously accessing articles. The > site gets about 750,000 page views per month, so, while it's no Yahoo, it > does get a decent amount of traffic. > > Option 2, on the other hand, would remove the load from just a few templates > by setting up actual pages for each article, but, it won't be as easy to > make site-wide design changes this way, and I won't be able to do some > things like automatically paginating longer articles over several pages. > > Anyone have any input or words of wisdom they can offer on the best method > for setting up a content management system? Thanks! > If possible, make the home page (and other heavy traffic pages) "semi-dynamic" by generating static HTML from PHP. This also provides a preview system for CMS administrators. In other words, administrators login and make changes to the database and see a script-generated home page. Once satisfied with the changes, they call a PHP script to update the public home page. The public home page is static HTML that's generated by opening a script-generated version of the page as an http: URL with fopen(), written to a temp file, then copied to replace the previous static home page. Detail/article page displays would remain script generated. -- Lowell Allen