Web Database Implementations

Greetings,

I’m new to ModX, having built and tried all sorts of CMS’s - PostNuke, Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, etc., before putting my hat in with this one. It really does look promising and the community here seems great.

I’m trying to wrap my mind around how to use ModX to accomplish the goal I want with my latest project and want to solicit feedback from people more experienced with the product.

My basic goal is to create a web database containing user-driven content of reviews/information about various visual media - shows, movies, and the like. I’m thinking something wiki-like that has some controls which will allow me to approve submitted items before they are published. If the site becomes popular whatever I do probably has to support a fairly large volume of entries. I really thought about it - looked here, in the resources, and in the wiki, and I believe I have three paths to follow.

1)Use ModX.
I’ve done a little research and could perhaps do a little work with a combination of eform2db, ditto, and TV’s to create basic entry and display of data. This seems promising but I am worried about the future when the sheer number of articles end entries might be too much for ModX to handle. I’m also unsure if web databases are really what ModX can be used for.

2)Use a wiki, like Mediawiki, for the db, using ModX strictly for navigation/page design/news/blogs.
This has the most "out of the box" functionality and calls a separate database so volume may not be as much of an issue, but I have two issues - one, that most wiki softwares don’t really integrate look and feel (not to mention authentication) into CMS’s, and two, that I do want to have some control over the content submitted - I don’t want someone to edit something wholesale and lose formatting or content.

3)Code something from scratch.
This obviously gives me the greatest flexibility but takes the most time. I also have some but very limited knowledge of web database development using php/mySQL and may not develop everything correctly right off the bat, making this a little intimidating.

Ideally, I’d love to use MODx for everything. I’ve had a little while to get a handle on the system and it seems great. I just am unsure if for what I want - a user-driven editable web database - if MODx’s modules are a good path to follow. Input would be great, especially if anyone has any examples of sites with MODx you’ve put together that have a similar purpose to what I’d like mine to be. Thanks!

Depending on when you need to go live, this sounds like an ideal application for the coming 097 release honestly. 096 will cap out comfortably (depending on hardware of course) somewhere around 5000 documents. In the next day or two there should be a merge from the 097-abac branch into the main trunk ... I’d start there.

I might just do that - thanks for the quick answer Ryan!

I’m not in too big of a hurry to go live, and even so, I definitely think I won’t hit the 5k limit before 097. I might start playing around with the public preview if it’s around someplace to see what can be done.

I am curious to see if others have similar concepts to mine (there was a singular thread I read about for a person trying to build a reviews and articles repository that seemed closest to what I was thinking of), so hopefully if there’s anyone out there I’ll get a better idea.

Isn’t that essentially just a blog? Or, in other words: articles + user-comments? Plus sections (categories) + maybe tag-clouds / keywords?

It isn’t. My intent is to create a repository of information, not an articles listing, which means the system would have to have the capacity to handle thousands if not tens of thousands of individual entries. Even if someone blogged 3 times a day all year that is just over a thousand entries per year so blog software never really has an issue with capacity. I’m thinking closer to Wikipedia rather than Wordpress.

An entry would display a smallish image, some basic information, and a couple of interesting unique sections (like "plot" or "spoilers") for some flavor. Contributing to an entry could be as simple as entering a comment about it or choosing to edit the content itself for corrections and changes. Doing the latter would involve bringing up a fil-in form for each section of a document entry and changing/adding things accordingly. I want the content to be a little controlled so the wiki model isn’t quite a fit for me because it’s a bit too "open" in terms of who and what people can edit. Awardle’s work with the scripting for Venue comes to mind.

I’ve also worked with Wordpress and MT before and understand the pain of creating templating to fit around an existing design. Like I said, I’d love to use MODx for everything, and after reading some of the information for 097 it sounds like there will be a greater, more robust support for what I want to do, but I was definitely curious to see if someone already had something sort of similar going already.