Knightnet Site Design - Threaded Discussion and News List Designs

Threaded discussion/news list design

I need to provide the site with a method of easily managing a list of items. e.g. News, bug reports, information lists, to do lists, etc.

The list processor should allow for the following features:

• Store title, content (HTML/Text), author, last editor, creation date, last update date, close/expiry date
  
• Add, amend, delete entries via web interface
  No need to manage files, this would be too cumbersome for handling lots of small entries
• Allow the list to be secured from unauthorised addition, amendment or deletion
  And log author/ammend user ids.
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A database driven format might be best for this though it would add to the site search/indexing complexity and might be dificult to integrate with external search engines. With a file/folder driver format the complexity would be in managing the structured data, I guess XML files would be best but that would mean writing an XML handler which would be more complex than a SQL handler simply because I've never done it (though it could be used with non-SQL sites). A file/folder driven site would also probably be slower for large numbers of files.

Progress

• 07/May/2003 - Started development (see Site News for demo)
  Based on mySQL, stores basic required info. but data has to be manually maintained.
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