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Off-loading content management (thoughts/opinions)

Posted: Thu Aug 06, 2009 10:57 pm
by Griven
Hello, all.

My current project is to completely redesign my company's intranet. I will be using PHP and MySQL in this endeavor, as it will not be a huge site--although I'm sure a bit of scope creep will occur.

One of my goals is to offload content management onto other staff members, so that I can focus on improvements to the business logic, and not the content of the pages. Lately, I've been wondering how best to go about this.

- One obvious option is to keep all content inside the database, and just create and edit it from there. In order to make this option scalable, I would likely need to keep a list of all site URLs in the database, and create links to a separate content table using foreign keys.

- Another option is to keep content in HTML files, which can then be edited using some form of on-page editor such as TinyMCE, or another off-page editor. To make this scalable, the web user would need permissions to the file structure in order to create and delete pages. Potentially, this can be dangerous.

- Yet another potential option is to keep content in XML files, and allow an editing/scaling scheme similar to the HTML option. Admittedly, I don't know exactly what this option's benefits and drawbacks are.

What are your opinions on these hypothesized solutions, and--perhaps more importantly--what are your experiences with off-loading content management? What pitfalls did you encounter, and how did you overcome them?

Re: Off-loading content management (thoughts/opinions)

Posted: Fri Aug 07, 2009 11:59 am
by Christopher
Whether you store the content in a database or files should not matter that much if the datasource is abstracted a little. Either way you will load and edit the content with TinyMCE and then save it back. I am not sure what you mean by "keep a list of all site URLs in the database" ?

Have you thought of just using Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, etc. for this task? You will get a huge amount of functionality instantly that would take you years to implement.

Re: Off-loading content management (thoughts/opinions)

Posted: Fri Aug 07, 2009 12:18 pm
by Griven
arborint wrote:I am not sure what you mean by "keep a list of all site URLs in the database" ?.
That was just me thinking out loud, really. Pay no mind. :-)
arborint wrote:Have you thought of just using Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, etc. for this task? You will get a huge amount of functionality instantly that would take you years to implement.
I certainly have, and I might yet decide to use one of those. However, I see a project such as this as a way to learn new things, develop my skills, and create something that's entirely my own. So, in the spirit of learning new things, I wanted to get other people's thoughts on content management and how they've gone about it in the past.

Re: Off-loading content management (thoughts/opinions)

Posted: Fri Aug 07, 2009 1:20 pm
by Christopher
Griven wrote:However, I see a project such as this as a way to learn new things, develop my skills, and create something that's entirely my own.
I thought this was a project to "redesign my company's intranet" ?

Re: Off-loading content management (thoughts/opinions)

Posted: Fri Aug 07, 2009 2:30 pm
by pickle
Keep the content in the database.

Our website runs on a custom CMS that (in a nutshell) holds the page-specific URL, id, content, and id of parent group for each page. When a request is made, the URL is walked through until the requested file is found.

So, if a file like this is requested: http://mydomain.ca/services/it/printing/, the controller/index page finds the group at the root of our website with the 'services' url. It then looks for children of that group with the url 'it'. It then looks for the children of that group with the url of 'printing'. It then shows that page.

We also have page-by-page user rights. There are large swatches of the website that aren't regularly edited by me, but are edited by someone else. They log in to the CMS, navigate to the page they want to edit, then use FCKEditor to edit the content that's stored in the DB.

Re: Off-loading content management (thoughts/opinions)

Posted: Fri Aug 07, 2009 2:49 pm
by Griven
arborint wrote:
Griven wrote:However, I see a project such as this as a way to learn new things, develop my skills, and create something that's entirely my own.
I thought this was a project to "redesign my company's intranet" ?
The professional goal and the personal goal are not mutually exclusive.

Thank you for your concise response, Pickle.