With a lot of organisations that had a simple online presence going fully online, I’m needing to look at the scalability of websites I maintain in RW.
I have 2 projects in Rapidweaver.
One project has about 60 pages. But the project just uses straightforward Foundation and is easy to update.
The other project has way less pages. But it uses translations. I’d like to add more but even with the Joe’s stacks it’s a lot of work. There is a blog with 124 posts now and that scales very well so far.
Thank you.
One of mine now has 58 pages. It’s increasing by 14 pages a month, hence the scalability question.
What are you adding each month? This sounds like a good idea for a blog.
In general, vlogg posts linking to Youtube. But also some text content, although that’s very minimal.
That sounds perfect for a blog. Total CMS is a bit of work to set up. But it doesn’t even have to look like a blog.
We don’t really want to incur any extra costs at this point. I work mainly in the voluntary sector that has been hard hit by covid-19.
The website I maintain is 1500 pages. It consists of 8 project files. It consists mainly of a library of “reports.” There is also a store and separate free eBook section. It grows by roughly 200-300 pages a year. I do not use the resource manager at at. I upload and maintain the “resources” myself. Most of the time I update and add pages by using “single page” page publishing. I’m wise in how my parent and child pages are setup so I can upload “sections” by using “single page publishing” and including the child pages with uploading. If I really need to upload an entire project I export locally and then use ftp/sftp to upload.
Wow! Do they have a separate navigation system? I’m thinking how you integrate them into one site?
It’s easier than you think. I can explain as needed but the basic premise is that all projects have the exact same pages needed for navigation setup but the pages/tabs that represent other sections/projects are forwarding pages. Or you can use actual pages and forwarders in the htaccess file. So section “A” has all the content pages of “A” (perhaps the Store) but all other master nav pages forward to the appropriate url of the “real” page. Of course, this system requires you to use real url links to other pages that are outside of each project or section, but believe it or not I actually prefer that for several reasons. Let me know if you need more detail.
That sounds really good. I’m thinking of somehow creating archives of old posts in a similar manner. The archive could be one project per year (ie 2020, 2019 etc), that would seldom need touching. Just trying to figure out the structure for it to work.
What are these posts currently in? RW?
Yes. Using Foundry. I’m currently test driving a Foundry + Poster 2 version to make it simpler.
Simple, yes, I like simple. Understood. One of my projects contains content that is added to just once weekly. Thus, I’m only in that project once a week. One project is a 100 page “Directory” which seldom changes. “Reports” gets a new one (or two) daily. Store is very active too.
Best of luck with your ideas and project.
Depending on how you look at it, my largest RapidWeaver-based site has either 70 pages, or 36,887 pages.
The site is Promo.zone ( https://promo.zone ), and it’s a search engine for promotional products. Each product has its own dynamically generated page. The 70 pages that make up the RapidWeaver project are used to create the 36,000+ product pages - and they do so “on-demand” so to speak.
I developed the site using the Foundry framework, as well as a custom microframework that I developed, and a handful of custom stacks. The product information is stored in a MySQL database. The site and database are hosted using Amazon Web Services. More information about the technologies that I used can be found in the site’s FAQ ( https://promo.zone/faq/ ).
Promo.zone is the largest, most complex, and most successful site that I’ve developed with RapidWeaver. I don’t sell anything through the site, but it does generate a lot of traffic. As a result, it also generates a lot of inquiries from companies in the promotional products industry, who are interested in the technical services that I provide.
When I first started out building my web site (https://airportguide.com) I was building similar to you where I would add extra pages where the page layout was the same. My site probably has over a million pages now (unique URLs) so that strategy will not work. The main lesson learned from this is to figure out how to consolidate common web pages into the minimal amount of RW pages. Similar to @timdietrich and @1611mac, I have about 100 RW pages in a main RW project file. I have a second file that I call INCLUDES. It is contained of reusable “modules” of html and text files that I can upload to my server separately and call from the web pages. A perfect example is if you have several navigation schemes on your web site and your website numbers in the hundreds or thousands of pages as your web site will do one day, and you need to add a new item in your navigation. I only need to update one line of code in my text file and upload it without ever having to touch the main RW project files.
One MAJOR thing to also consider is that you should really be looking at building a dynamic web site where a query will return the records from a database. My entire site is created using the Foundation theme (in the process of transitioning to Foundation 6), php, and MySQL (20+ data tables with over 1000 fields and 2GB of data). It’s an extremely powerful combination that you just can’t do with static pages.
Your example described above is a perfect case for using a blog like TotalCMS or Armadillo. It will handle an unlimited number of pages for your updates as long as the page layout is the same. It will also save you a lot of time and trouble maintaining the site as it grows. Yes, it costs under $100 but it will save you much more than that in time and headaches as your site grows.
I hope this helps. While your site is nowhere near the size and complexity (you want simple), there are many similarities in what you are doing that lends itself to use of a database. Setting up TotalCMS or Armadillo is probably the simplest approach for what you want to do. Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll try to answer them.
Thank you @1611mac, @timdietrich & @forteweb!
These insights are extremely helpful. I can see how RW coupled with a CMS or database can scale really well. As I already have a licence for Armadillo, I shall give that a try.
A large number of years ago (perhaps 20-25 years?) I had a bookstore where pages where made on the fly. I made a product page “template” (html) and put unique strings (ie: $$$Name, $$$Price, $$$Desciption, etc) in where the product info should merge. I then had a FileMaker Pro database with all my product info. I would then export the item info from Filemaker as a text file (flat file). I then wrote a rather simple php script which generated the page on the fly when the item link was clicked. The page was dynamically generated by reading the Template file and inserting in the product data from the product flat file. This was all before iPhone, tablets, and such. I didn’t need worry about responsive pages and such, Wow, have things changed.
Funny you should mention FileMaker. I would have no web site if it wasn’t for FileMaker pre-processing all the data and preparing it to import into the MySQL database. I pre-process data from multiple sources into about 1000 fields and 20 data tables. It used to take me about 4 days to do it manually until I eventually scripted the entire process in FileMaker to reduce it to about 3 hours of computer time. If you program in the php or html structure using text concatenation in FileMaker, you can spit out entire web pages or sections of pages that are ready to go.
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