Re: Best Content Management METHOD...

I'm a firm believer in option 1. 750,000 page views per month is only 1 page every 3.4 seconds (ish) on average, so I don't believe you'd see any server load even in peak periods. If there IS server load, you can have an option 3, which basically combines option 1 and 2. Keep the raw article data in a database which is there forever. Then run a program which batch-creates 'HTML' pages from templates and the database, and publish a static website (as per option 2). The difference between option 2 and 3 is that you get to keep all your raw article data in the database, and when you change your template design, you can just do a new batch-creation of all the static html pages. I do this for a client of mine who has got 6 months left on a hosting contract without MySQL... essentially I do a weekly "build" of a static site from data and templates stored on my local server, then upload these static pages. Cheers, Justin on 09/07/02 4:11 AM, Monty (monty3@hotmail.com) wrote: > 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! > > Monty >