Comments on: Isara’s new management system

By: 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?

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By: 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.

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By: 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?

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By: 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. 🙂

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By: 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 🙂

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By: 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?

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By: 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.

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By: James

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

By: 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!

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