Comments on: Data Driven – what, when and how

By: Alaskan Aficionado

Alaskan Aficionado — Fri, 03 Sep 2004 03:40:54 +0000

Techpentance: An intentional, dramatic turn from ignorant and/or abusive misuse of technology to the beneficial and wise application thereof.

Dean, Thanks for the great reply.

Peace of christ to you all.

By: Adrian Warnock

Adrian Warnock — Fri, 27 Aug 2004 17:09:25 +0000

We use blogger for our sermons website. Not sure if that would qualify as data driven because of course the html is formatted by Blogger. We plan to improve the look of the pages and of course it will be really easy to do so once they are all published in the same way.

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 13:16:23 +0000

good timing – i have a meeting tonight to discuss the next (long awaited) plan for the church website, http://www.wheelockheathbaptist.org and I want to go to a CMS – I’m looking at mambo but it might be too complicated. Unfortunately i’m sure they’ll want something up by tomorrow

By: Daniel Pronych

Daniel Pronych — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 06:18:47 +0000

Frank, as far as search engines go you can always use ModRewrite if your on Apache (i.e. contactform.shtml?contactID=1 can turn into contactform_contactID1.html) and compliments browsers and search engines just fine. Additionally, it makes a lot more sense for users (you never know if they keep close watch on the length of the URL!)

I find database-driven sites can save a lot of effort but they only do so through a lot of careful fore-planning and a lot of grunt work before actually released. For example, I designed a sermon system for a church that allows the pastor to update/add his sermons easily from MS Word, but it certainly isn’t going to be easy if I want to change the database now! You can view the system at http://pvcc.cbcregina.ca/sermons/ — see? Databases are cool when well thought out and designed. Happy coding!

By: rick

rick — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 03:26:04 +0000

hey – that cj dats DB book is still the best one out there – don’t knock it!

By: Al Burden

Al Burden — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 02:12:44 +0000

Another benefit of the data-driven website, if it’s done correctly: The time-strapped webmaster doesn’t have to update all the content al the time. That can be left to a less technically-minded but time-rich person I’ve employed a PHP/MySQL content management system called Xoops (www.xoops.org)to power our church’s website. It takes a bit of effort/CSS & HTML knowledge if you want to truly customise it to look the way you want (although there are lots of “themes” available for use)but once it looks the way you want, updating it is a snap.
(Yes, i’m a Xoops convert, but there are plenty of other Content Management Systems out there)

Great site, i’ll have to spend some time reading your articles.

By: Kristen O'Brien

Kristen O'Brien — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 21:56:03 +0000

As far as Google (and other search engine crawl bots) are concerned, they see the pages just like your visitors do.

My simple guess is that it visits your page (typically twice a month for most church sites, heavier traffic ones maybe more) and follows the links on the page at the time and caches that information. It doesn’t matter if those links are dynamically generated, it just looks at what the html shows.

By: Frank Ramage

Frank Ramage — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 20:55:26 +0000

DD sounds good… uniformity, maintenance, change management.

What about search engine visibility? (IOW, how’s the search engine gonna see my compelling content nestled safely in a MySQL table?)

I’m almost positive this has been addressed in the websphere, but I bring it up here…

-Frank

By: Kristen O'Brien

Kristen O'Brien — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 19:52:38 +0000

Some other benefits to data driven web sites:
- Completely change how the site looks and feels without updating all of the data.
- Manipulate what gets shown on the page dynamically (i.e. show only events for the next two days, only have 10 items of a list on each page, etc.)
- Provide custom searches (search only music lyrics, only calendar events, only audio messages, etc.), instead of searching the whole site
- Allow users to enter information instead of doing it yourself (i.e. secretary adds calendar events, people sign up for mailing lists, people can send prayer requests, etc.)
- Can hide email addresses in fun ways with little work (putting contact ids in form submissions instead of email addresses, dynamically generating images of email addresses instead of using a standard mailto link, etc.).

These are just the things that I’ve come across as being beneficial.

By: Jon Mark Allen

Jon Mark Allen — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 15:15:04 +0000

Not really related to data-driven concepts, but…

“techpentace” sounds like such a cool word, but what exactly does it mean? Google and Dictionary.com are both ignorant of this word. I’d love to use it in a sentance of my own…