[thelist] CMS

Norman Beresford n.beresford at anansi.co.uk
Thu May 23 04:39:01 CDT 2002


Hi all

I'm building a CMS for a client at the moment, and I thought I'd run some of
the central principals past the list to see if people thought I was going
very wrong in areas, or if I'm going in the right direction.

The system allows for users to have multiple roles, with each role having a
different set of abilities.  I have an author role, who is able to create
new articles and edit their existing ones.  Editors, who can edit and delete
any existing article, and can approve articles for release.  They can also
add/edit/delete categories, as well as triggering rebuilds of altered/new
articles.  The third role is admins, who have the ability to add/edit/delete
users/authors/editors.  As I said users can have multiple roles, so a
author/editor can create an article, approve it and publish it to the site.

The actual articles are stored in a M$ SQL Server database.  I've got a
table looking like this:

tblArticles
articleID int
articleCategoryID int
articleAuthorID  int
articleDate  datetime
articleAuthorisedBy int
articleAltered bit
articleDeleted bit
articleHeadline varchar
articleStrapline  varchar
articleShort  varchar
articleFull  text

When a article is created it isn't authorised by anyone, so it won't appear
on the site.  Once it's authorised the altered field will be set to true, so
that when the site is next rebuilt the article will be published.

The actual article text I'm storing as XML in the articleFull field.  At
publication I'm combining it with the headline field and information from
the author table and then transforming it using XSL before writing it to
disk as an HTML file (I figure this will allow me to easily extend the
system to allow it to publish to a number of channels).

I'm not handling multimedia assets at the moment.  My intention is to simply
store information about each asset in the database (dimensions, alt tags for
images etc) and then allow users to embed XML tags in article to place the
assets, allowing them to change some properties of them (ie changing alt
tags, default captions, that sort of thing).

Does this all seem fairly sensible to people?

Norman








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