Ok ive run just about all the OSS cms systems out there. And I keep coming back here and just trying to pull the trigger.

relevant url
http://www.sudhian.com

We are a decent size tech review site. have over 1200 articles and 4000 pages attached to articles and 3000 newsposts (one page articles) with forums,newsletters etc. normal stuff from a tech community site (30k forum users)

Initially Id like the site moved over and eventually the forums aswell. Im tired of windows and coldfusion,IIS and mssql server

has anyone done large scale conversion of multipage articles?
is the an article module geard more to articles than blog posts?
  my articles table is basicallthe like a blog post, then pages for an article are in another table are associated with an article if its say a review. I know ee imports mt entries but mt isnt really geared to article concepts (multipages)

can a user add content to multiple “blogs” Id like to have a news,article,faq “blogs” with some admins able to post in all,one or a subset of the list

wysiwyg editor support with image uploading?

Scaling: we do over 7 million pageviews a month. Any ee sites have similiar traffic?

Just some basic ones to get started and to see if this can be done. Im very well versed in mysql,pgsql,mssql and oracle (dba by trade) so doing some table manipulation isnt above me. Just would like some thoughts on how some have done it before. any pitfalls etc.

thanks for any info

Sam

I’m sure others will chime in as well, particularly on the practical experience end of things, but I’ll tackle a few of the basics:

wysiwyg editor support with image uploading?

Not yet, but in the upcoming EE 1.4, I know Paul has used the new EE extensions to integrate at least 3 different WYSIWYG editors - it’s discussed in more detail in this thread.

Scaling: we do over 7 million pageviews a month. Any ee sites have similar traffic?

I know iLounge.com is in the multi-million page views per month, and I know applematters.com is also frequently cited as one of the larger EE run sites.  With millions of page views, you’ll need the horsepower to handle a dynamic site, but EE is well optimized and gives you the tools (caching, tag parameters, etc) to run a large site efficiently.

is the an article module geared more to articles than blog posts? my articles table is basically like a blog post, then pages for an article are in another table ...

The weblog module can be used as both a more traditional ‘blog’ and as an article/CMS type application.  You can create multiple ‘weblogs’ (think of them as sections or data containers)- and each can be associated with a category group and a field group.  For your multi-page articles, you[‘ll want to create a field group with say a ‘summary’ ‘page 1’ ‘page 2’ ‘etc’ fields- you can have as many custom fields as you like.  For a more traditional ‘blog’, you might have a field group with only ‘summary’ and ‘more’ custom fields.  You can set it up however you like.  Then you can use pagination in different ways - including a standard article pagination. 

In short- this should be no problem.  You can also set up member access so that member groups can post to only specific ‘weblogs’.

Now- importing all of that data will be a project.  As you note, MT export format may not give you the level of control you want for the multi-page articles.  There are folks in the EE Pro Network offer this type of service.  If you’re good with php and mysql, you could probably do it yourself- it depends on how fast you want to get it done and how ‘hands on’ you want to get.

Hope that helps a bit- if there’s anything that needs clarification, just ask.

rob1 - 30 November 2005 11:42 AM

I’m sure others will chime in as well, particularly on the practical experience end of things, but I’ll tackle a few of the basics:

The weblog module can be used as both a more traditional ‘blog’ and as an article/CMS type application.  You can create multiple ‘weblogs’ (think of them as sections or data containers)- and each can be associated with a category group and a field group.  For your multi-page articles, you[‘ll want to create a field group with say a ‘summary’ ‘page 1’ ‘page 2’ ‘etc’ fields- you can have as many custom fields as you like.  For a more traditional ‘blog’, you might have a field group with only ‘summary’ and ‘more’ custom fields.  You can set it up however you like.  Then you can use pagination in different ways - including a standard article pagination. 

Thanks for the quick response. Above is where I hit a snag about supoorting true multipage articles. Some articles have 2 pages and we have articles of 30pages. So having to make say 50 custom fields just in case we have a 50 page article is a deal killer. can you imagine having 50 diff wysiwyg editors on a single data entry form? I sure hope there is more than one way to skin a cat so to speak. Any further input is welcomed.

BTW I just bought the noncomercial version and forums to run my personal stuff, with the idea of building experience for migrating 3-4 high traffic clients to it if I can do the above smoothly

As far as the “scale” question, yes there are many sites running millions (or tens of millions in some cases), as there are sites like macdailynews.com, ilounge.com and others that get millions of unique visitors per month (so multiply that a number of times over for the page views per month).

For some discussions on performance, see this thread and this thread (and my comments) but the bottomline is that you will need the hardware to support the traffic, as the scale of traffic a site can handle comes down more to the servers not just the script you are running.

Nevin,

Thanks for that. I should have looked for more performance related stuff ahead of time. Hardware isnt an issue.  My pagination questions are the only thing stopping me from making a reccomendtion to switch.

Sam

The pagination bit would require some kind of work around.  I can think of a few possibilities, but I end up wondering how you’re doing it now? 

Do all 50 pages go into a single textarea in order to enter them into the db?  I’m thinking not, as I’m pretty sure it would get cut off by the browser.  Are these uploaded text files, or actually in a single field in the db for all 50 pages?  Also, how do you currently set page breaks-—<new page>—type thing in the text?

Just trying to brainstorm here, because the stock EE way to go at it would be 50 custom fields.

Regarding multi-page articles:
My solution would be to write a custom module and make it associate page content with articles.
The pagination would also be taken care of by that module.

:: andy

They way the current cms is setup:

I have an article table. that fit into a weblog easily as its just arti_id,article_title,article_intro, author id,pubdate,publish (y/n) and a link to a forum thread

then i have a pages table thats associated with articles. It has

page_id,article_id,article_body

In the admin all articles are listed and you can drill down into thm to add and edit their associated pages

Im not bashing ee at all. But this is what I mean by a real review/article system.

pagination is very simple in this setup as at the end of a page you have a next link to the next page in the db. and there is a dropdown that the user can select what page to view

It sounds like a custom module is the way to go. Any takers? Id be willing to pay for it or work out something that we can release it to the community. Youd basically have to extend a weblog entry to have pages.

This 1.4 sound like it would make this much easier. Any chance of looking at a beta?

Sam

Codeslave: I’ve sent you a PM.

Hee- yea, a custom module is the way to go.  This FR is for ‘Page-Based Content Management’, which I’d find handy for different reasons.  My hobby site’s a fanfic site, and I’d like to get around to having an ‘e story’ module- i.e., a single story can have multiple chapters- which are basically ‘pages’ in your intended application.  There are work-arounds using the current system, but a dedicated module would be cleaner all around.