[opencms-dev] Data management for multi-domain regional customer portal

[Christoph Schönfeld]

Dear fellow list members,

I would like to ask you for a few hints regarding the data management of 
my project with OpenCms.

The project is a multi-domain regional customer information portal. All 
domains must be hosted on a single installation of OpenCms. I found out 
that this can be done using the multi-site mechanism of OpenCms.

The regional portals share purpose, layout, site structure and content 
elements (address/vendor catalog, customer information articles, 
advertisement banners).

There are several metadata elements structuring and coupling the content 
elements, in particular topics, subtopics, keywords and regions. The 
metadata shall be used to build the site content dynamically. Topics and 
subtopics build the navigation menus.

Each regional portal must list content associated to its region above 
content assigned to its neighbor regions. Effectively, all portals show 
the same content, just with different ordering (local content first).

The banner selection during page rendering depends on topics, regions 
and keywords of the displayed content elements.

Each click on articles, addresses and banners must add an entry to the 
site statistics.

My questions:
1. How would you approach the management of the metadata (topic 
hierarchy, region list, etc.)?
2. Are OpenCms's document properties suitable to represent the metadata 
information? How would that affect performance?
3. Are there open source or commercial modules available for the 
management of addresses, banners and statistics?
4. In order to keep up the consistent edit/test/publish process, can the 
offline/online concept of OpenCms be reused for the persistence needs 
for data and metadata extensions I need to write? The user experience 
must not be disrupted by unfinished work (changes in the topic structure 
must not become visible to the portal visitors before they are approved 
and published).
5. Is it possible to create a workflow item for an editor each time an 
author creates a new article?
6. Does OpenCms support automatic creation of article excerpts for the 
display in article lists for a topic and in search results?

My first idea to solve metadata management (question 1) is to store them 
in XML files within OpenCms VFS (which would fulfill the requiremets of 
4) and create an API above this which also integrates the banner 
selection. The address and banner management would, IMO, be the only 
parts not worth putting into the VFS because the addresses are a typical 
database application and new or changed addresses and banners do not 
necessarily belong under control of the publication workflow.

Looking forward to any hints and thoughts,

    Christoph from Germany

-- 
Christoph Schönfeld
Softwareentwicklung

Sylphen GmbH & Co. KG Hamburg

E-Mail cschoenfeld at sylphen.com
http://www.sylphen.com

C1 - das XML-basierte Redaktionssystem für Ihr Cross-Media-Publishing