How To Make a Large Website Easy to Maintain?

radderfire · 21 Jun 2016 at 12:45

Hi Guys

What technique do you use to make a large website easy to maintain? At the moment I am just using .php includes, but this has big limitations. I guess I should be using a CMS. Would you say Wordpress was a good choice for a large website? I need to set unique meta tags and preferably have descriptive urls.

Thanks

AHarvey · 21 Jun 2016 at 18:52

I suppose it depends on what the website is for and what you mean by large?

radderfire · 21 Jun 2016 at 22:48

AHarvey said:
I suppose it depends on what the website is for and what you mean by large?

A site showcasing products with 400+ pages.

kaku · 22 Jun 2016 at 00:28

It's some kind of online store or company offering? If those 400+ pages are all individual, it would suggest an architectural problem.

Assuming the majority of those "pages" are each of the individual products, I would probably look at streamlining it using some kind of templating solution (or even an MVC-type structure depending on the complexity of the site). So yes, some kind of organised content management.

Dup · 22 Jun 2016 at 00:57

I use CMSMS which has modules such as Listit/LISE which allows you to define fields (images, files, text etc) and then create items based on those in the CMS. Each one is also given an individual URL.

You can then create a template using Smarty to display the products in a foreach, and each one can link to its own generated page using a separate template and is given a pretty URL to go with it.

400+ sounds a lot though, so there's no management in place then I would highly advise figuring that out. Are there any database features in place for these products with a search or is it purely flat pages?

radderfire · 22 Jun 2016 at 12:04

kaku said:
Assuming the majority of those "pages" are each of the individual products, I would probably look at streamlining it using some kind of templating solution (or even an MVC-type structure depending on the complexity of the site). So yes, some kind of organised content management.

It's a shopping site. Each page related to a type of product, e.g. the microwave oven. Yes, I need a better templating system than the one I have currently. At the moment, I just have a template file which contains php includes for the header and footer and various other bits of the page. So, when I need to update fundamental site structure, I would need to resave 400+ pages, which I don't want to do.

So, yes, I need a better template system, where I have individual content on the page, but it's easy to change the fundamental page structure, e.g. header or layout of divs etc etc. So I need page content into a database, and then a templating system.

I'm guessing Wordpress is a good candidate to do this, and I'm just wondering what else is out there to consider.

Rgds