I'm planning how to use Umbraco for a new website. The old site has lots of news posts, going back several years. I'm wondering how I might organize them in the Umbraco content admin.
I know I can aggregate them any way I like using XSLT, by month, year, topic and so on.
It seems like putting all the news articles under a single folder would be unusable. That node in the tree would have hundreds of pages.
How do others handle this content size problem? Should I create folders for each year and put the news articles inside the folder for the given year?
Are there other issues I'm not considering or is it perfectly fine to have a node with hundreds of pages under it?
You are absolutely correct in seeing that having that many nodes under a single node is a bit unusable.
There are a few things you can consider for dealing with large amounts of data such as your news articles.
1. Use Year and possibly month and day folders to group your articles. This also makes creating archives a breeze.
2. Use a user control to display your news from 3rd party tables. Of course, you will not have an integrated interface to add/edit/delete the news items.
3. Use an XSLT extension to pull the data into an xslt macro. Similar to the above, but provides xslt templates and transforms.
I think the first method is the way to go. If you have more than 20 or 30 articles per group (year, month, etc), then consider segmenting down further. You can use Action Handlers/Events to have any new articles automatically moved into the correct folders, thus simplifying the end-users experience by simply having them create a post and publishing it.
If you need help with the action handler/event code, let me know, and I will post a copy of one I have been using.
I have also used the blog4umbraco package for news articles. this puts the articles in year/month/day folders. Just have to do some minor changes to change wording from "blog" to "news" and disable comments.
The Datefolder package is what you need for this. It's based on create date so that could be an issue for your old news articles. Did you allready import your news items? I'm the author of umbImport, an import tool that can import data from various data sources where you can map document properties against columns from your datasource and then import the data. With the 1.0 version (soon to be released) you can map the create date also. So when you use that to import your articles the items are nicely structured. If you care to test please mail me richard[at]soetemansoftware[.]nl
How to organize lots of news articles
I'm planning how to use Umbraco for a new website. The old site has lots of news posts, going back several years. I'm wondering how I might organize them in the Umbraco content admin.
I know I can aggregate them any way I like using XSLT, by month, year, topic and so on.
It seems like putting all the news articles under a single folder would be unusable. That node in the tree would have hundreds of pages.
How do others handle this content size problem? Should I create folders for each year and put the news articles inside the folder for the given year?
Are there other issues I'm not considering or is it perfectly fine to have a node with hundreds of pages under it?
Regards,
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
You are absolutely correct in seeing that having that many nodes under a single node is a bit unusable.
There are a few things you can consider for dealing with large amounts of data such as your news articles.
1. Use Year and possibly month and day folders to group your articles. This also makes creating archives a breeze.
2. Use a user control to display your news from 3rd party tables. Of course, you will not have an integrated interface to add/edit/delete the news items.
3. Use an XSLT extension to pull the data into an xslt macro. Similar to the above, but provides xslt templates and transforms.
I think the first method is the way to go. If you have more than 20 or 30 articles per group (year, month, etc), then consider segmenting down further. You can use Action Handlers/Events to have any new articles automatically moved into the correct folders, thus simplifying the end-users experience by simply having them create a post and publishing it.
If you need help with the action handler/event code, let me know, and I will post a copy of one I have been using.
Case
Hi Andrew,
I have also used the blog4umbraco package for news articles. this puts the articles in year/month/day folders. Just have to do some minor changes to change wording from "blog" to "news" and disable comments.
Cheers
Paul
DateFolder wraps up that functionality for use anywhere, http://www.nibble.be/?page_id=4#datefolder (I've not tested this personally though)
Dan
Hi,
The Datefolder package is what you need for this. It's based on create date so that could be an issue for your old news articles. Did you allready import your news items? I'm the author of umbImport, an import tool that can import data from various data sources where you can map document properties against columns from your datasource and then import the data. With the 1.0 version (soon to be released) you can map the create date also. So when you use that to import your articles the items are nicely structured. If you care to test please mail me richard[at]soetemansoftware[.]nl
Cheers,
Richard
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