[opencms-dev] Design Question

[Alex !]

Hi All,

Just wanted some direction as to how I should go for a new site build I'm 
about to do. I want to get the design right to avoid problems later on. I am 
about to create an advertising website using OCms - to which I'm quite new - 
athough I know Java and have worked with other cms's before.

(Following Joachim's good advice I have built the Javadoc and looked at the 
API - quite powerful.)

What I'm looking at is a site for initially a couple of hundred users, but 
which will very quickly expand into the thousands. We'll have about 4 site 
admins. All these users to be outside of the workspace with no possible 
access, but the ability to register themselves with the site, login, and 
then be presented with a user homepage, from where they can add/edit/delete 
their property adverts. The site will then need a search facility, to search 
an a set number of fields and set possible values - dont necessarily need 
free text search right now, but a good possibility in the near future.

Regarding the adverts, all I really need is to display the adverts in a set 
format (layout and styles) and have the users input the advert details into 
say text fields on a html form. This is so that every advert on the site is 
uniform and the content is completely separate from the presentation. (Users 
cannot start creating their own layouts etc.)

So the fields from a typical advert would be something like: (for example a 
property advert)

* Author (we will get from the user login details)
* Date (again supplied by opencms when advert will be created/published)
* Location (eg, town, city, etc this field will need to be searched on)
* Number of bedrooms (another search field)
* Price range (search field)
* Property Type (search field)
* Property Description
* Property Image

I'm not sure whether these should be properties of the page/item, or should 
be content bodies. I have enabled multiple content bodies and got them 
working in the worksppace editor although it is a pain to keep selecing the 
next body from the drop down just to change a single line etc; and the 
content in these bodies is searchable (I am assuming). However, im used to 
using Mediasurface, in which the way we do things is similar to adding 
properties to a page/item - my only question is would these properties eg 
NavPos, Title, etc be searchable, and where are they in the database?? I 
cant find them? I can easily envisage creating the html form to take these 
properties and then just add them as required when creating the 
advert(page/item).

I would require the following templates (all outside the workspace): (ive 
already mostly created the jsps for these to some degree):

add
edit
archive
delete (possibly)

As mentioned also a search facility and a search results page(s) with advert 
overviews.

Thats really it for the basic functionality.


Bearing all this in mind which path should I  follow and why - ???

* Something like the article management module?
* Adding properties to a resource type (eg page) on creation of the page?
* Creating a custom resources type with default properties? (not quite sure 
about this)
* Create an advert module? (for this i'll need help coz they is basically no 
documentation around  )
* do something xml based ?

So the user would register, they would be given a login, and then a 
directory would be created for their adverts to be placed under. I could 
even assign the user a new project and give the site admins permissions to 
all the advertisers projects. This would be ok for  small site but not if 
users were to grow massively. E.g. 1 new user = 1 new dir = 1 new project. 
Plus I read that there is a difference between webusers and regular users, 
wiht permissions etc.

The user would then log in and then choose to add an advert. They would then 
be presented with a HTML form with text fields which they fill in and select 
an image and hit the submit button. The advert is uploaded into their 
directory, pending review by site admin who will then approve or reject the 
advert for publication.

I am still wondering how to do the search. Is it better to go for my own sql 
queries or use the lucene module???

I would really appreciate some solid guidance on this.

I have asked Joachim about this, and he suggested an approach like the News 
module (backoffice) - but there is no documentation for how to go about 
doing this.

Kind Regards

Alex

p.s. somebody mentioned that Olli Aro has created a site with thousands of 
users being managed!  can we ask him his methods for doing this?

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