[thelist] FSO Vs. DB

Sun Apr 14 08:11:01 CDT 2002

Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Hi Ken

Which file would the users be editing? Would it be the whole page (with the
includes being non-editing), or just /content/group1/mainPage.html ?

If it's the former, then both FrontPage webs, and DW have reasonable
support for whole-page editing. However, you need to be careful that your
content authors don't play around with which includes the page is
referencing.

If it's the latter then you can keep the template and display pages
separate from the editable content, and your page code is along the lines
of:
<!--#include virtual="/toptemplate.fhtml" -->
<!--#include file="/web/private_content/group1/$thisfile.content.fhtml"-->
<!--#include virtual="/bottomtemplate.fhtml" -->
(where private_content is parallel to public_html and is so not exposed to
a URL)
But then you'll need to be very careful not to get the included content
becoming a complete HTML file, so your end result is the likes of:
   <html>
   <head>
   <body>
   top template
   <html>
   <head>
   <body>
     include /content/group1/mainPage.html
    </body>
    </html>

   bottom template
   </body>
   <html>

However, this only really works if either:
1) The entire variable content of the page is in one content block (ie no
page-specific bits elsewhere in the page (eg meta-tags))
2) You're happy for your template to be less strict and allow authors more
control over what they edit (will only really work with whole-page editing)

Most sites will go for option 2, because most pages will have a number of
content slots - even if one of them is the main one. But the trouble with
having a less-strict template is that it makes it very difficult to
separate your content from your design - it locks you into that design,
which has implications for future flexibility (ie to do a visual redesign
will likely require re-entering *all* the content).

It makes a lot of sense to have a template which can insert several bits
into their appropriate slots, and to store those bits as siblings within
the content object. (That could either be as fields in a RDBMS record, or
as properties in an OODB. I've seen a couple of OO CMS, and there's a
certain logic to it).

That way, you can keep your content cleanly separated from your design, and
be more confident that authors are only editing what they're supposed to be
editing.

If you really need some kind of easy (non-HTML coding) editing for
micro-formatting (headings, emphasis, links etc), then there are a number
of solutions out there, producing varying quality of code. Spectra had a
WYSIWYG dHTML control which looked like a normal textarea, but with
formatting buttons at the top. I've seen a few applets doing the same
(ektron have one which is said to be improving). You could look at
Structured Text which is *majorly* simple.

Cheers
Martin

I've got a template page with dynamic content. What are the pros/cons of
storing the content in individual files versus a database?

A bit more info, perhaps:

Like I said earlier, I've got a template and content separate. My boss
says that a system where the content is in separate HTML files and then
brought in via server-side includes would be better than having the
content in a db. He wants some kind of common content folder, with
individual subfolders for each group of different permissions allowed.
Like this:

/content/group1/
/content/group2/
/content/group3/

With a typical file looking like this:

top template
top template

  include /content/group1/mainPage.html

bottom template
bottom template

The main issue here is editing the content that gets brought into the
templates. The Boss thinks that having it in separate HTML files will
allow people to open up "their" files in FP or DW, and edit away. I view
this as more of an admin nightmare.

Putting the content into a db and slapping a web front-end for editing
on it gives me the control I need, with only a slight hassle to the user
(using web-based editing, rather than a client side proggie like FP/DW).

Has anyone ever been faced with this before? I'm curious to hear the
pros/cons of both.

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