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Advanced site: SHOULD I try this with txp?
I’ve used Textpattern for several sites now, and am familiar with what the various plugins can and can’t do. Now I’m faced with the chore of building a sort of knowledge base for my company, and I am considering a txp solution. I certainly couldn’t write the whole thing from scratch, what with my near-zero coding skills and other project work taking up my time. So I’m considering migrating a database of reports and studies into txp and teaching the staff how to populate the new records. I would use a system in which each report becomes an article, and custom fields store the different metadata fields for each report.
But. The metadata gets pretty complicated. Each report, for instance, can have several authors, can cover several named geographic extents (counties, quadrangle maps), and can apply to zero or many geologic formations. Right now, the data is in a MySQL database, and the many-to-many joins are handled the usual way, with normalized tables that meet in the middle with a <code>REPORT_HAS_AUTHORS</code> table, for example. I’m using a MS Access (Wait! Come back! Don’t leave yet!) front end for data entry, but I’ve written php pages to handle the search and presentation. Txp would let me use one common solution for entry, management, and presentation.
How could I handle all these many-to-many relationships elegantly in txp? Using custom fields to hold delimited lists (like the Keywords field) seems like a big step backwards. Authors, place names, and geologic formations ought to have some referential integrity to keep spelling mistrakes out, so there would have to be some admin-side magic involved. If I could write txp plugins, I’d make one that presented a form for entering related records in a table, and another that presented related records in a table. Best of all would be a groovy form like the del.icio.us tag entry box that allows auto-completion for existing tags, but lets you add new ones painlessly. If the integrity of the entered values could be assured, I wouldn’t mind so much the strings of values in a single field.
The next thing I’d need is a more advanced search function. At the very least, it would handle non-contiguous multiple word searches with <code>MATCH…AGAINST</code>., and let users refine their search criteria with all those joined values I mentioned. The old ob1_advanced_search plugin seems to have fallen out of development, so I’m not sure if this will be possible.
Is this sort of site feasible, given the tools out there right now? Has anyone else tried anything along these lines?
Thanks,
Matt
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Re: Advanced site: SHOULD I try this with txp?
You have structured and normalized data. There are no built-in tools or plugin (that i am aware of), that would let you handle those from within textpattern as it is right now. You’re going to have to do some handcoding anyhow.Given that fact, it depends on whether that which textpattern gives you is relevant in parts which are your core requirements. If it saves you time, go for it, otherwise start from scratch.
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