Right tool for the job?

I’m using Ditto with some success, but I’m questioning if it’s the right tool for the job.

Scenario
Created a sight that has a lot of links to external sights for industry news. Each link has a title, summary, source and link to the story.

The site’s home page shows links to the most recent four entries.

I’ve created a single page that will house all of the entries for archive purposes. It’s also the container for each entry, which is created as a page in MODX.

I need to be able to search the summaries, but they’re really short.

In fact, all of the entries are really, really short.

So here’s where the questions come in:

• Is this the right tool for the job?
• I’ll probably be posting about 20 stories per month, so at the end of a year, I’ve got over 200 pages in that news container. At what point do I worry about MODX choking on that?
• Could I/Would I be better off trying to use something like Jot for this purpose? Would Jot even support that?

Any help or insight you can share would be so appreciated!

Quote from: cubefisher at Feb 02, 2010, 11:15 PM

So here’s where the questions come in:

• Is this the right tool for the job?
• I’ll probably be posting about 20 stories per month, so at the end of a year, I’ve got over 200 pages in that news container. At what point do I worry about MODX choking on that?
• Could I/Would I be better off trying to use something like Jot for this purpose? Would Jot even support that?

Ditto is great for making lists of documents/news/etc.. I think this is the snippet you need.
Jot is a commenting snippet. It’s not appropriate for lists.
I read somewhere that Modx EVO cache begin to choke with ~5000 documents..

..or maybe a custom db table so you won’t need a ressource for every entry: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,44426.msg266285.html#msg266285

Thanks, Sharkbait; I was thinking much the same. Ultimately, that’s what I did. Created a Module that allows me to manage the entries, and a snippet to output the links. I think it’ll scale much better. Unfortunately, now, that puts a big complicating factor on my use of AjaxSearch.

If anyone has any suggestions of a good search script to use to allow a user to find entries, lemme know. I’d love to use AjaxSearch, but the documentation’s sketchy on the use of custom tables. Looks like it’d be simpler to fire off a simple select statement.

Thoughts anyone?