The Correct Architecture For A Large Site

I’m new to EE, but this is an architecture question and I think your best bet is to go with “all of the above” or at least “some of the above”

From what I’ve learned so far, EE was designed with the mind set that “channels” are to be considered content types.

Keeping that in mind, you would create a new channel every time you wanted a new content TYPE. So if you wanted to write News, Blog Posts, Editorial content… you would create a channel for each TYPE of content.

• News channel
• Blog channel
• Editorial channel

Classifying data is what your Categories are for, so use them within your channels.

• News channel – Asia cat — China cat —- Beijing cat – Europe cat — Germany cat —- Berlin cat

  This way, when you write a new entry, you choose what content TYPE (channel) you are publishing, and then classify it using Categories.

Either way, if you plan on organizing the world’s cities, that’s going to be a MAJOR headache, and I wish you a lot of luck!! 😊

PS: visit websites like the BBC and Bloomberg Business to see how they organize their websites and COPY as much as you can!!! Seriously, follow the leader is a great strategy.

Cheers, Pete

Hey Peter thanks for the feedback! I did make a mistake there I noticed it just after your explanation of the channels? I had meant to say Template Group/Template. World cities is definitely going to be a a time consuming task but I like the thought of it 😊. Maybe i’ll just start out with the Major cities to keep the major headaches down a bit 😊. Anyhow I’ve taken in what you’ve explained here and really appreciate your feedback, it’s always great to see how others would go about implementing something. Thank you!

If you would like to have more control of the URL structure, then you probably should check out an add-on like “Structure”.

I image it would be very difficult/impossible to get a totally custom URL structure out of the box with EE… again, I’m new to EE so I’m not speaking from experience, just what I’ve been reading up on lately.

(thanks for starting this topic by the way, I’d also like to find out how others are tackling this problem)

What type of content for each city?

Sounds like a content monster - EE’s abilities aside, what will the maintenance model be?

How often will it change?

Who will change it?

Is the project geared such that it will get that big, or it could?

Hey Mike. Thanks for chiming in here. To answer your questions:“what type of content” I think the best way to explain it is the content will be services offerred by either a business or an independent contractor, the business or contractor will be able to post and ad with the services they offer in the city that they’re offering it. hopefully this will help give you a better idea of why I’m asking this question. This is a EE2+MSM site. The default_site is the purpose of the question “Correct Architecture For A Large Site”. That site will be host of all cities e.g. ads > united states > nevada > las vegas. I also will have a site for each city so my setup looks like this:

default_site - citya - cityb - cityc - ect.

The plan is to allow members to post ads in either the default_site or the city* site and that ad would be displayed on both the default_site e.g. default_site.com/ads/us/or/portland it would also show up on city* e.g. cityportland.com (MSM site) and vice versa, I think that might answer your question above “Who will change it?”, it’s all user generated content. “How often will it change?” Some of the content will change by the minute depending on the geographic area and other areas of the site will not change as often. “Is the project geared such that it will get that big, or it could?” I’m pretty confident that the site will get that big, I’m basing it on the fact that I’m already doing it in the most competitive city and we pretty much the authority int that city. I didn’t follow on your maintenance model could you explain more?

Traffic / server issues aside (which i’m not qualified to speak on) I think you might be pushing it to use EE in this case.

There is a known limitation over the number of custom fields you can have in one installation - all of the fields are created in some common MySQL tables, and MySQL has limitations on how wide a table can be. There is no exact hard limit as it depends on the types of fields, but once you start looking at >800 fields in an install I’d start getting concerned about it.

There has been rumor of someone running “100’s” of sites in one EE MSM installation, but I’d wager to bet they’re pretty simple.

Maintenance model = what type of team will be running the site? When content is wrong, libelous, spam, etc will there be more than just you assigned to it? What will the workflow for that process be?

EE might make a good “proof-case” tool for a city or two, but I think it’s ambitious to think a $300 CMS is going to run a site with user generated content for “all major cities in every country” without some serious customization from both a front end and back end perspective.

LOL. Thanks Mike, dreams are crushed every so politely.

See you in Texas!

Still shooting for it! =o)

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up”

Don’t give up hope.

Forget about the limitations of the system and just build your site… there are only 2 possible outcomes:

1. The site only gets moderately popular and you won’t have to worry about EE’s limitations.

2. The site becomes wildly popular, totally stretching the system to it’s limits; in which case you will be making money and can easily afford the required modifications… perfect!

😉

HI ExpertOrBust (what’s your real name?) I’m running a website with 40 channels, 35.000 members, 4 websites, 2 forums, over 2000 visitors a day, 500.000 pages views a month.

I’d go for decidated Add-On, which should be to complex, to ‘group’ your content. Categories are not the way to go, as categories are designed to ‘tag’ content, not really to order content.

What is the expected URL structure? Are you flexible in this?

At first glance, my strategy would be to make each city an entry, and relate each ad post to the city entries.

that’s dependent on the number of expected postings.

We have all countries in a channel, and relationships indeed. However, linking thousands of postings to this table has lead to an incredible large exp_relationships table, and seriously influences performance and caching. We still haven’t figured out how to solve this, but it is certainly NOT the way the go.

What about introducing a new field type?

Erwin