I'm going to build a site that will eventually have ~200 articles in it, each article containing a half dozen or more charts/figures that will be updated occasionally, in addition to the associated text. They will need to be grouped by 3 levels, like 'country', 'state', 'city'. Rather than use a RTE and have to deal with laying out each article individually, I've created properties for each figure, caption and text areas, to automate the layout/formatting and so they can be updated in parts and not have to recreate a whole article for a small change.
Initially, I thought the obvious thing to do was create content nodes for each level and sub level and just put the articles below whichever branch of the tree they belonged.
Then I thought that wasn't making very good use of the computer's brain, and might make it more difficult to automate updating down the road, so I thought I would just add 3 properties to represent the levels for each article and use those to retrieve/sort/update them.
Now I'm re-thinking it and wondering if that's not wasting the power of Umbraco to manage those associations. I'm not much of a programmer, although I enjoy tinkering with it, so I'd like to get some expert opinions on what will take the best advantage of Umbraco's capabilities, while not creating too much work that is beyond my skill.
I took it on thinking it seemed like, either way it should be doable with a little basic Razor. There isn't any uncommon user interaction required. I think my biggest concern is that I might ignorantly structure it in a way that makes updating it from an external data source more difficult than it has to be.
Which way would you build a scientific reference site?
I'm going to build a site that will eventually have ~200 articles in it, each article containing a half dozen or more charts/figures that will be updated occasionally, in addition to the associated text. They will need to be grouped by 3 levels, like 'country', 'state', 'city'. Rather than use a RTE and have to deal with laying out each article individually, I've created properties for each figure, caption and text areas, to automate the layout/formatting and so they can be updated in parts and not have to recreate a whole article for a small change.
Initially, I thought the obvious thing to do was create content nodes for each level and sub level and just put the articles below whichever branch of the tree they belonged.
Then I thought that wasn't making very good use of the computer's brain, and might make it more difficult to automate updating down the road, so I thought I would just add 3 properties to represent the levels for each article and use those to retrieve/sort/update them.
Now I'm re-thinking it and wondering if that's not wasting the power of Umbraco to manage those associations. I'm not much of a programmer, although I enjoy tinkering with it, so I'd like to get some expert opinions on what will take the best advantage of Umbraco's capabilities, while not creating too much work that is beyond my skill.
I took it on thinking it seemed like, either way it should be doable with a little basic Razor. There isn't any uncommon user interaction required. I think my biggest concern is that I might ignorantly structure it in a way that makes updating it from an external data source more difficult than it has to be.
Suggestions?
Thank you.
Matthew
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