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Maximum number of sections, categories, keywords, custom fields?
I’m working on this radiology teaching file for residents / doctors, currently with a simplified organization scheme using several categories and a couple banks of custom fields containing a handful of values each (the drop-down menus at the top).
We want to make a more comprehensive taxonomy than this for a version to incorporate with my hospital’s PACS, which will require a good way of organizing a very large number of categories.
I’m getting the feeling Textpattern may not be up to the sheer scale (if not the complexity) of the taxonomy, including dealing with practicalities like selecting nested categories efficiently in both the back and front-end. Also, since the site could potentially grow to included tens of thousands of posts, I wonder also if Textpattern is up to the task in that regard, given comments like this.
The ACR codification consists of 10 anatomy categories, 722 subanatomy categories, 90 pathology categories, and 10,438 subpathology categories. Here is a site with a live interactive version of the index. Drupal, with it’s multiple hierarchical taxonomy system, will be my fall back, but as I’ve never used Drupal, I’m trying to avoid that if possible.
If I had to use Textpattern to organize this content, I would use article categories for anatomy and subanatomy. In the ACR codification, some subanatomies are contained in more than one parent anatomy (as Drupal allows). In Textpattern, these duplicate subanatomies would have to be eliminated, but we might be able to live with that.
For the 90 pathologies (broad pathologic categories), I would use a single custom field. Ideally, by selecting different anatomy categories in the Write tab, some of the custom field values would show / hide. I know this is possible with some javascript, and would make a great plugin if anyone (including myself) has the ability and interest to make it.
For the sub-pathologies (essentially these are “diagnoses”), of which there are over 10,000, I think I would use keywords, and make use of tru_tags with its jQuery Autocomplete plugin feature so people don’t have to wade through 10,000 options to find what they want. I would pre-enter all 10,000 of these in the database, then use form validation to make sure that when on the Write tab, the author entered one of the existing tags / keywords.This organization does separate the pathologies and subpathologies, rather than making them part of the same hierarchy as in the ACR codification, but, here again, this may be livable.
I want to reserve the use of sections to define different content-types, as there will be many various types of entries for the site, and I would customize each type with bot_wtc. The other option would be to make broad anatomy categories into sections, moving subanatomies to custom fields, and use article categories to select content-types. Then I would just want a way to customize the Write tab per content type (categories in this case), so I would need the equivalent of bot_wtc with “hide in category” options.
If you have made it to the bottom of this message, thanks for reading. And now my basic question again: I’m wondering if there is a practical maximum limit fo the number of sections, categories, keywords, and custom fields used in Textpattern. Specifically for my case, is it feasible to use 700+ nested categories and 10,000+ keywords (even ignoring practicalities such as navigating and selecting them in the back-end)? I’m really interested in how it will impact the performance of the site. Will there be no effect on speed? What about when you have 50,000 articles spread among the various categories, custom fields, and keywords and you are using article_custom to do some intense filtering? Is there a bottleneck somewhere to be aware of?
Last edited by aswihart (2010-07-04 18:50:59)
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Re: Maximum number of sections, categories, keywords, custom fields?
txp_category has lft and rgt columns set as INT(6). IIRC, that leaves 5 digits for lft/rgt (1 is for the sign), so you could go up to 49999 categories (because each category increases the max rgt with 2)
txp_section supports an unlimited number of categories (limited only by MySQL)
Keywords are not limited, though you can only store a certain amount of keywords per article (it used to be max 255 chars).
This doesn’t mean I’d recommend using TXP for this. I hope people who know both Drupal and TXP can answer that question.
Custom fields used to be limited to 10 per article (not sure if that limit was raised).
The number of articles is virtually unlimited (10^10).
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Re: Maximum number of sections, categories, keywords, custom fields?
Great info Ruud, thank you. Do you also know about a limit for the number of images?
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Re: Maximum number of sections, categories, keywords, custom fields?
Images are as unlimited as articles.
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