Apr 23 2008
Just thinking out loud…about databases
What’s the difference between a blog post, a forum post, a news story, a comment, an event listing, and a business listing? Not much, as far as your database and your app are concerned. They all share similar attributes, like title, body, author, time published, time edited etc. and so it might make sense to put them in a database together. I’m thinking, of course, about sites that might have all those types of things, like a community newspaper site.
If you did that then you could easily build new types of applications within your site just by defining a new category and (optionally) creating a couple of new templates.
Advantages: simplifies search, speeds coding time (since one type of query would work for all content areas).
Default template: display title, body (if any) and then list any children in a dl (title, snippet) format. From there, you can define special list, list item, and single item formats that each child member can inherit.
Wordpress does something like this, and I was pretty close to doing exactly this on ParrySound.com.
Ok, back to coding.
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