University of Bath department site -- 500 pages -- now on line

[mwy]

After a long [long] time the site for the [url=http://University of Bath Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering]University of Bath Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering[/url] is now happily running.

The site has almost 500 pages, now being managed by 9 editors. It has an internal section that is accessed when inside the university network. Every external page has a link to the internal section when connected.

A module had to be created to manage people on the site. This links to existing central university databases of information, but adds in extra information, and is used to generate any page under the People section, as well as the People and Publications pages under each of the Research centres. Tags to link to either an individual's personal page, or their personal contact details, were also created. Buttons to put in the tags have yet to be written... (The module is very site specific, and not robust, so it isn't suitable for any other situation)

As there are so many pages, and in some cases the tree structure is very deep, the left menu shows only parents, siblings and children of the current page at any one time.

Images in the top left of the pages are controlled by the random_image tag. the left image is always an architectural one, and the right is a civil engineering one. Images in the right hand column are controlled by a separate function that takes arguments from a content field in the page, permitting editors to specify either individual images or groups of images from the image tree structure for that particular page. At present there is no link from an image to a particular page, but the image tree structure would permit this in the future, should the client find the money to do it.

More about the site, including the use of CMSMS, can be found by clicking on About This Site at the bottom of every page.

This site is the first time I've used any content management system, (and the first time I've had to write CSS in anger...). I found it a delight to learn and to use, and the newly appointed editors of the site -- who are mostly administrative staff in the department, with one or two academics -- have all found it very easy to use. So a big thank you to all of you out there who've made CMSMS what it is.

[CNBorn]

Can't find the url.... Looking forward for this site.

I have one question: Is that these pages ( like 500 ) are being managed under the original CMSMS 'Page' Section or under the module your write?

I have a site, in which there is a section with about 30 articles. I felt kind of uneasy to manage this pages. Hope to find some point to see how CMSMS can do in handling huge number of pages.

[alby]

Can't find the url.... Looking forward for this site.

There is a error in url bbcode;
address is: http://www.bath.ac.uk/ace

Alby

[mwy]

Can't find the url.... Looking forward for this site.

Sorry for the delay and the mistake in the urls:
main site: http://www.bath.ac.uk/ace
People section (running from new module): http://www.bath.ac.uk/ace/people/
Research section: http://www.bath.ac.uk/ace/research/

I have one question: Is that these pages ( like 500 ) are being managed under the original CMSMS 'Page' Section or under the module your write?

All the pages are being managed under the original CMSMS 'Page' section. The new module contains information about people, linking existing staff information in central universty databases with information not currently held elsewhere, e.g their descriptive biographies, what research group they are in, etc.

The content of the pages is owned and edited by [currently] 10 different people, with varying levels of editing rights. The lowest level people can only edit certain pages -- for these I had to manually assign the person to be the editor of each page. On the whole they prefer this, as it reduces what they see on their screen and they can get to their pages much more quickly. Middle level people can edit any page but e.g. can't add new or edit existing entries in the people module. Top level editors can do any sort of editing -- except make news stories appear live -- does anyone know of a solution to this? I'm having to do it. Finally the internal project manager and I can make any change.

I have a site, in which there is a section with about 30 articles. I felt kind of uneasy to manage this pages. Hope to find some point to see how CMSMS can do in handling huge number of pages.

I will let you know how the management of such a large site goes. At the moment it is fine, we've only had one mishap of a page with complex data being deleted rather than hidden. Everything else seems to be going smoothly, but it's only been live for a couple of months.

Apologies for the delay in replying to your query.

[nivekiam]

I will let you know how the management of such a large site goes. At the moment it is fine, we've only had one mishap of a page with complex data being deleted rather than hidden. Everything else seems to be going smoothly, but it's only been live for a couple of months.

I would be very interested to know how it goes.  Can you share how large is your database for that many pages?

[giggler]

I had a question about the people section, could Cataloger not have been able to handle that? Since all the individual pages are pretty consistent, seem like you can use attributes set in cataloger and then display them according to each category for the listing pages.

[mwy]

I would be very interested to know how it goes.  Can you share how large is your database for that many pages?

Um, well, I'd be happy to, but I have no idea how to find the size of the database. If someone could tell me where this information is I'll pass it on.

I had a question about the people section, could Cataloger not have been able to handle that? Since all the individual pages are pretty consistent, seem like you can use attributes set in cataloger and then display them according to each category for the listing pages.

This is a very good question, and I don't know the answer because I didn't look at Cataloger in enough detail. I would still have had to edit the Cataloger code to pick up the links to the two other university internal databases. But I expect you are right, and I could have saved myself lots of effort (though it was fun It is difficult to know how much CMSMS stuff is out there and whether there is something that can be used, isn't it?

Thanks for looking!

[nivekiam]

Here is one way, save the code below to a php file.  You'll need to set your database server, username, password, database and the prefix you used for the cms tables.  It's not checking for an empty string for the prefix, so if you didn't use a prefix, comment out these two lines:
if (stristr($row['Name'], $cms_prefix)) {
  } // end if

However, then it will tell you the size of the entire DB and not just the CMS DB if it's sharing a DB with other stuff.

Code: Select all

<__html><head><title>mysql Database size</title></head></__body> 
<h1>mysql Database size</h1> 
<?php  
function file_size_info($filesize) { 
 $bytes = array('KB', 'KB', 'MB', 'GB', 'TB'); # values are always displayed  
 if ($filesize < 1024) $filesize = 1; # in at least kilobytes. 
 for ($i = 0; $filesize > 1024; $i++) $filesize /= 1024; 
 $file_size_info['size'] = ceil($filesize); 
 $file_size_info['type'] = $bytes[$i]; 
 return $file_size_info; 
} 
$db_server = 'localhost'; 
$db_user = 'userid'; 
$db_pwd = 'password'; 
$db_name = 'databasename'; 
$cms_prefix = 'cms_';
$db_link = @mysql_connect($db_server, $db_user, $db_pwd) 
 or exit('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error()); 
$db = @mysql_select_db($db_name, $db_link) 
 or exit('Could not select database: ' . mysql_error()); 
// Calculate DB size by adding table size + index size: 
$rows = mysql_query("SHOW TABLE STATUS"); 
$dbsize = 0; 
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($rows)) { 
 if (stristr($row['Name'], $cms_prefix)) {
   $dbsize += $row['Data_length'] + $row['Index_length']; 
  } // end if
} 
print "Database size is: $dbsize bytes<br />"; 
print 'or<br />'; 
$dbsize = file_size_info($dbsize); 
print "Database size is: {$dbsize['size']} {$dbsize['type']}"; 
?> 
<__body></__html> 

[mwy]

Thank you so much for the code. It says the database is 3Mb; however the database is currently running two separate CMSMS sites -- the second is a smaller site with a different domain name.