Sections should have_many pages?
September 13th, 2006
I’m a bit stuck on the best way of organizing pages in a cms, like eribium. I’m chiefly looking at the menu generation side of things.
Should there be sections, with multiple pages per section?
Should there be a hierarchy of pages, such as in cmsmadesimple?
Should there be a list of pages, with a unconnected menu manager (this was the original idea)?
How do you think pages should be organized? I suspect it depends on what type of mind you have, but I’d like to get a general consensus before I go ahead.
Please comment below, or use skype (oldmanorhouse)
4 comments on “Sections should have_many pages?”
01
In Mephisto, I went with a has_many :through assocation between Articles and Sections. This actually started out as a tagging interface, but I realized it was more than just tags.
Basically, there’s a single bucket of articles that may or may not belong to one or many sections. I think it works well.
Personally, I don’t like deep hierarchies of sections/pages in a CMS, which is why I designed Mephisto this way.
02
Thanks for the comment. I think you’re right about hierarchies and I’ve developed eribium on almost the same lines as Mephisto. Your CMS is great and is one of my main sources of inspiration :). As the asset manager is Mephisto one of its main features, you might be interested in this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maccman/245610725/
03
I thing that when creating a page, one should have the option of selecting a parent, as well as a sort order. this way you can have sections of your site listed.
People
people 1
people 2
places
places 1
this will make the sites more customisable. if one really wanted to they could have a stupid hierarchy going infinitely down but that is their loss. who are we to tell people how to design their data.
04
Personally, I organize as follows: Section has_many: Articles, and Article has_many Pages that acts_as_list.
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