> > Very rarely, its easy to do backups of huge amounts of data if you > > know where to find it, its hard to trawl all over a changing structure > > looking for the things that need backing up. Particularly if, when you > > try to restore it, it needs to go in a different place to where you > > found > > it! > > Backing up is generally one of the lesser of my worries.
Backing up is usually a no brainer, especially in a static structure, but even in a dynamic one you can just do a find on the file types. It's restoring a dynamic structure thats really hard, and usually a manual process... > Maintaining content is primary. Oddly enough I usually expect content maintenance to be a 'business as usual' kind of thing. The content goes in one place per author and the code picks it up as needed. > Unless you are dynamically generating static pages, > they are a nightmare to maintain. If the content is dynamic in any way I always generate them dynamically - and that includes anything with company logo etc on it. About the only pure html pages I use are the Error reports - 404s etc... > be quite repetitive. A large amount of the code on any page is the > same as on any other page (page structure, boilerplate, etc). But most of that is template code just picking up content from a folder someplace (logo images, standard menus etc) and CSS style settings. > I think it's a generally accepted principle that computers are better > at handling thousands of files like that better than humans are. The Absolutely. > > Yes but a CMS normally uses a static structure with dynamic content. > I think we might be using different meanings of structure. I'm > referring to the site structure, as in which page is a parent of which > other page. The site structure is just another aspect of the content. Ah, OK. I'm referring to the physical site structure, the folder heirarchy. > A reference to the parent/child pages is just another attribute like > content and title. Agreed, I'd expect those to be managed in the code and templates. > A (good) CMS would create a dynamic structure for the user to browse, > with folders and pages easily creatable and movable, I'm not sure I agree with that. It should allow movement of pages across folders with auto update iof relative paths etc, but not necessarily dynamic (ie at run time) changes. > and references to pages would be dynamic so that if yo0u move a > page internal links to it still work. I don;t necessarily see that as needing to be a dynamic feature, I'd probably prefer to do those kinds of changes under controlled circumstances and do the updates as a batch update process. >> Dynamic content is 'A Good Thing', dynamic structure is usually bad. > > But structure is just an aspect of content. If you mean navigation structure I agree, but physical structure - where the files live is absolutely not. And to make it so creates a huge headache for the site administrators - who usually cost a good deal more than the developers or content providers! Alan G. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
