[thelist] XML based CMS

Warden, Matt mwarden at odyssey-design.com
Sun Aug 6 20:31:57 CDT 2000


>    The php code will handle the flow of the document, user management,
> permissions and so based on user data thats on a DB.

Flow of document? Not sure what you mean by that. If it's what I think it
is, XML and an XSL processor can take car of that.

>    I want to use a DB to store article, news and user data on, so
> that I can get the latest articles and news from it. This is not
> very smart since the xml and the db will contain duplicated data,
> for example, the name of the contributor of the article. My question
> here is: can I somehow parse all the xml files to obtain from them
> the, lets say, the id of the contributor ? I think this should be
> possible, but what tools do I use ?

I think you are taking the wrong approach. XML *is* a data store. When a new
article is added, add it to the database, then generate an XML document
containing the article, the ID of the author, security information, etc.
Then, you only use the database for a store of articles (for archiving and
searching) and a store of all the available XML files and their location
(and maybe a summary).


>    Is the idea of using a DB to store info about the news and articles
> a bad idea ? (duplicated data)

I don't think so. Searching 1,000 XML documents for 'my search string' would
be much harder and slower than searching a database table. but, you can
really lessen database calls if you move the article info into XML files.

>    Since i want to be as much browser independent as possible i want to
> use a server side transformation of xml data into html. I found about
> LotusXSL
> from ibm. Does anyone know of another way to convert xml data to html ? Is
> this the best way to go ?

Depends. Can you access LotusXSL via PHP? You might have to use PHP modules
to do this.

>    I want to support wap. Is there such thing like an emulator for wap ?
> or a nokia emulator where i can preview ?

Well, you would simply use a WML stylesheet rather than an HTML stylesheet.

>    Thanks for your thoughts and ideas.

No problemo.

--
mattwarden
mattwarden.com






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