Let's say the website is for a car dealership. The owner would like to manage 100-300 cars and up to 500 customers (just as an example, IRL there would be many other entities too). What would be the Umbraco way to implement the backend? I immediately thought of two alternatives:
1) Create a Document Type for "Car", and a Document Type for "Contact". This leverages Umbraco's capabilities for creating, editing, and deleting the entities, but I'm worried that the content tree might get too big. Expanding the Cars node and getting 200 children would not be good. Is there a Best Practice for working with large numbers of entities in Umbraco, within the Umbraco framework? How does it scale?
Or
2) Create a custom Section and use custom User Controls to manage the data in some custom tables in the DB. Then we can use grids for compactly showing and paging large sets of data. The drawback is that we have to code a lot more, in return for the greater flexibility.
Am I missing any obvious other alternatives? How would you recommend to proceed? Thanks.
You could also have a look at the autofolders package: http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/about/roadmap/umbraco-41 which automatically generates folders and stores content under a certain date or character (ie a-z) like in the member section in the backoffice of Umbraco.
I think there is no problem to store cars in car documenttype, you can use autofolder as Roel subbest, but in your case think first about seo - what people's looking for - maybe car brands. Then divide cars into subfolders by car brands. This way subfolder name will be in url, which can help seo a little.
Contracts maybe can be stored as umbraco members - it give you some possibilities later (customer can log in and view it's data), there is already package clientarea, you can look at it
I would also go with the option to store cars in the doctype and divide them by brand (maybe also model). If you look at the source of Autofolders you will see how the structure is build using events. So if you change that a little to you own needs, you'll have a autofolder structure for your car documenttype.
I think that contracts should be stored in a database. Not in Umbraco itself. It's a contentmanagement system and it's working perfectly for that but not a contract management system. However you can create a custom section that shows you the contract information in Umbraco. I've did that for a customer. It's not very hard ,basically like normal asp.net. The only thing you need to do is to configure it. Tim has a nice blogpost with code how to do that. If you find that to difficult you could also create a Dashboard control. This is a normal usercontrol but when you add a reference to that in the Dashboard.config file it will be picked up in the given sector automagically.
I hope you will have enough info to get started. If you run into any issue let me know.
The "Umbraco Way" to store lots of data
Let's say the website is for a car dealership. The owner would like to manage 100-300 cars and up to 500 customers (just as an example, IRL there would be many other entities too). What would be the Umbraco way to implement the backend? I immediately thought of two alternatives:
1) Create a Document Type for "Car", and a Document Type for "Contact". This leverages Umbraco's capabilities for creating, editing, and deleting the entities, but I'm worried that the content tree might get too big. Expanding the Cars node and getting 200 children would not be good. Is there a Best Practice for working with large numbers of entities in Umbraco, within the Umbraco framework? How does it scale?
Or
2) Create a custom Section and use custom User Controls to manage the data in some custom tables in the DB. Then we can use grids for compactly showing and paging large sets of data. The drawback is that we have to code a lot more, in return for the greater flexibility.
Am I missing any obvious other alternatives? How would you recommend to proceed? Thanks.
I could imagine you'd make folders for car brands (or types, if he only sells one brand), that would limit the number of folders in en backoffice.
But creating a custom section might be a better bet, as you said: you'll have greater flexibility and full control.
Like Sebastiaan said when using lots of content pages within Umbraco the tree might get big and not really user friendly.
However in the next Umbraco version (4.1) the tree will be completely refactored: http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/about/roadmap/umbraco-41 using jquery. So in terms of performance it will probably improve.
You could also have a look at the autofolders package: http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/about/roadmap/umbraco-41 which automatically generates folders and stores content under a certain date or character (ie a-z) like in the member section in the backoffice of Umbraco.
I think there is no problem to store cars in car documenttype, you can use autofolder as Roel subbest, but in your case think first about seo - what people's looking for - maybe car brands. Then divide cars into subfolders by car brands. This way subfolder name will be in url, which can help seo a little.
Contracts maybe can be stored as umbraco members - it give you some possibilities later (customer can log in and view it's data), there is already package clientarea, you can look at it
Petr
I would also go with the option to store cars in the doctype and divide them by brand (maybe also model). If you look at the source of Autofolders you will see how the structure is build using events. So if you change that a little to you own needs, you'll have a autofolder structure for your car documenttype.
I think that contracts should be stored in a database. Not in Umbraco itself. It's a contentmanagement system and it's working perfectly for that but not a contract management system. However you can create a custom section that shows you the contract information in Umbraco. I've did that for a customer. It's not very hard ,basically like normal asp.net. The only thing you need to do is to configure it. Tim has a nice blogpost with code how to do that. If you find that to difficult you could also create a Dashboard control. This is a normal usercontrol but when you add a reference to that in the Dashboard.config file it will be picked up in the given sector automagically.
I hope you will have enough info to get started. If you run into any issue let me know.
Cheers,
Richard
The link to AutoFolders project is a typeo. It's should have been http://our.umbraco.org/projects/autofolders
The quantity of pages you're thinking about shouldbe fine in umbraco. Personally I've built sites running 1000+ pages without any issues.
Chris
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