CMS basics; static or dynamic pages??

Hendricus

Hi all,

I've been building websites based on my own cms system. They work alright but I want to make some changes. Right now all pages are created on visitors request based on templates and database content. This works fine for small sites. One set back is the fact that you have hyperlinks as; page.php?id=127812&do=list for instance.

Since most search engines will search these pages nowadays it's fine. But if a website becomes large and more popular it will put some pressure on the database. In most cases mysql. So I thought it would be nice to create separate static pages out of databse content. This will take off some pressure on the database. And I could use the database just for search functions....

Sometimes I come accross website with a static page for every page. But sometimes they even create a different folder site.com/xyz/page.php. What is better, is there some good documentation on what is a good way and where to get started? I don't know the 'official' name of building your website this way so it's very hard to look for on google.

Any help is appreciated!

Cheers,
Hendricus

Pig

The sites that use separate directories are usually not real directories, but are still dynamic pages. They use something like apache mod rewrite to turn /id/1/p/2 into ?id=1&p=2.

As for making your CMS output static pages, if all you are doing is looking up the page in the database, that is not a big load on the database. If you are doing complex work to assemble the page, or hitting the database for other reasons, you might save yourself some work.

As far as where to put the pages, that depends on your users's needs and how the navigation is set up. There is nothing wrong with putting everything in to an "html"directory when you generate the page. If your CMS allows you to have categories, then you could also put them in corresponding directories. You could still have URLs like /some/key/words/page, and use apache to turn that into variables that does a page lookup behind the scenes.

Hendricus

Oink Pig! 🙂

Thanx for that reply, that explains it a bit. So actually you are saying that the cms I've written does exactly the same as those not real directories. Where would I be looking for info on such an apache rewrite mod?

I've found some alright urls that explain how to do this cool funky stuff 🙂
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/sitemanagement/urlrewriting.html
http://www.syndk8.com/mod_rewrite_tutorial_and_help.php

And one more question, I am looking the page up in the database. There is one column for the subject, one for kerwords, one for date, and one for content. Images aren't stored in the database... I make one call to the database for all this info and maybe one more for the menu per page request. You are saying that there is not much need of changing into static pages then?

With the words of farmer Hoggett; Well done... well done pig!
Thanx a million!

Cheers

Pig

Here is the mod rewrite: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html

Yeah, if you are only doing a couple queries, you aren't putting much load on the server. You could still gain advantage by being able to take down your database server (or if it crashes for some reason) without effecting your pages.

Hendricus

Thanx mate!

Hendricus

Pig,

I've been trying to get it all to work. I don't know exactly what I'm doing wrong tho... maybe you can help?

I've got an url like:

/pages/topic_1_1/name.html

With mod rewrite I want to turn this into:

index.php?id=1&var=1

I've tried loads but I can't get it to work...

RewriteRule ^{pages/*([0-9]+([0-9]+)$} index.php?id=$1&var=$2

What am I doing wrong? I've had a simpler version working but then links towards my css, js and image files were all messed up. It only showed the html/php...

Any help would be appreciated!