Comments on: Isara’s new management system

By: Aran

Aran — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 23:03:48 +0000

Really like the system, looks good. Got a project where I need to develop similar system but not for classes/students/teachers but for a radio station instead so some similar but different systems going to be developed.

Got a few questions though, what was used to design your database and diagram?

Due to my site going to be having high amounts of traffic I was wondering would storing HTML in physical files that get written to the file system when ever HTML content is added/edited be better than in the database?

By: Blake Tallos

Blake Tallos — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 02:51:13 +0000

Nice work James. I’m glad the internship has worked out well for you. It seems to me that the students vary in age, but you should add a section in the CMS where student’s can check there grades etc.

By: Max

Max — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 16:23:06 +0000

I don’t see a real point why HTML shouldn’t go into a DB. WordPress does it and I’m sure a lot of projects do it. As long as the input mechanism is well written to escape malicious code away, HTML and especially HTML5 with its clean and lightweight syntax is a perfect markup language.

But what counts most is that you keep your codebase simple. If you add a HTML Markdown transformation feature, this just makes your code unnecessarily complicated.

Or do I miss the great benefit of having Markdown in my DB instead of HTML?

By: James

James — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 15:14:34 +0000

Good points, definitely, but what would concern me is the cost of parsing Markdown -> HTML every time the content is viewed. I guess it would be okay with some kind of caching. Food for thought, anyway. 🙂

By: Mathias Bynens

Mathias Bynens — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 15:10:50 +0000

Yeah, something like Markdown FTW. My own CMS stores every piece of content separately and is linked to a content type. I can then specify how the plain text stored in the database is transformed into HTML based on the content type.

For example, if I ever need to tweak the output for paragraphs (i.e. I want to get rid of the optional closing tag) I don’t have to change the content of every page; I just tweak the code that handles and outputs the content and BOOM it applies to the whole site immediately.

A site’s content != HTML.

Disclaimer: Now I feel sorry for zooming in on this one tiny detail so much. Please don’t get me wrong — really, nice work; I’m just sharing my opinion here 🙂

By: James

James — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 15:02:08 +0000

Hmmm, how would you go about storing formatted text? Would you store it in another markup lang, maybe something lightweight like markdown?

By: Mathias Bynens

Mathias Bynens — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 14:31:47 +0000

It’s not so much the separation of fields that’s bothering me; I just don’t think HTML belongs in a database.

By: James

James — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 14:06:59 +0000

@Mathias, there are separate x and x_html fields because the plain text needs to be displayed in certain views and in other views the HTML is required. I could just store the HTML and keep stripping all tags whenever I want to display the plain text but to me it seems better to store both... so the tags only need to be stripped once (when the field is edited). Glad you like the arrays! :D

By: Mathias Bynens

Mathias Bynens — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 13:56:50 +0000

The only thing I disagree with is in the database schema — separate _html fields? Yuck 😛

I love your use of arrays as wrappers for easily configurable settings.

Nice work!