Multi-Page Articles

[Anon]

I need some advice about how to best procede in making a large article into multiple pages. I have a system which works, but it get's rather complicated for editing, and was hoping someone whom has done this could shed some light on the most efficient way.

Currently I have an index for each grouping of pages, an article can be 1 to X pages long, each page is edited on a page by page basis. Obviously this is where I have failed, since the editing becomes rather complicated if someone has a 25 page document that needs 80% of page 2 removed, and now they must juggle all the remaining text, removing the 12th page, and pushing doing massive cut's and pastes. At this point I want to redesign it for easy editing, and still maintain some sort of order and of course efficiency on the front end.

Anyone have a good system? I don't need the code, I just really want to know if anyone has devised a good system for this, and is willing to give me some insight 🙂

Thanks,
Scott

[Anon]

It seems one can count <p>'s (or whatever) with a combination of word/character count. So if count is 1000 then end page before first <p> up to 1200 and if no <p>'s then go down to 800 and if none then go up to 1500. Or whatever. This will keep it moderatly consistant in size. Now I know of the 'wc' unix command but am unsure if PHP has such a function, I did not find one as I just did a quick search. Perhaps the strlen() could come in handy. Now for kicks, during this search we can look for headings (<h3> for example) and if they are found in the range then put them on top of the new pages as that would be nice. I'm just thinking outloud of course.

Now the counting must be done by disregarding html (maybe after strip_tags) and of course other considerations exist. And from all this some (and more) nicely sized pages can be produced all the while the "original" is one long page and quite editable by your peeps. Does this make any sense? Hmm. Of course all this parsing wouldn't be done at every page load :-) but it could make for a nice [PUBLISH] button which could create the pages and tweaking can take place from there. Thoughts? Is this a crazy idea?! Heck, this could even stick in the prev/next buttons, page numbers, etc. Now start coding!

[Anon]

Grin Hmm. I think I'll do something like that, thanks for the thoughts. Currently I store all my editorials/articles/comments etc. as text files, so once I query the DB for the name of the article, I can pass that around page to page with out too much effort. I'll let you know how it turns out, there's a few issues, but nothing I can't deal with 🙂

~S