Seperate Projects for one site

[Tony Gayter]

Has anyone here used a seperate project architecture for a single site? We have a site which has grown fairly large (80k plus pages) and it has a lot of workflows etc. I have been looking into splitting each of the main sections out into seperate projects and sharing content classes but it seems you can only link to pages in other projects.

 

Does anyone have a workaround to referancing pages in other projects or have any ideas about keywords accross projects? I dont think it will be possible but thought I would put the question out there.

 

 

[Joel Kinzel]

We share templates and that is working alright. We are still running into bugs here and there, and there are definite areas of improvement to be had. I know you can use special elements to reference pages in other projects, but I don't know how much else can be shared. I don't believe keywords can be shared or transferred, but perhaps someone with a little more project sharing knowledge can chime in there.

[Jian Huang]

Hi Tony,

One can use a single project and have multiple "root" nodes in navigation manager.  I tend to think of such project as a project with multiple mini sites.

If your use of keywords is simply for tagging pages and have them written to the page as it is publishes a meta tags, then a plugin to get the value of keywords from a project is possible to do.

If you use keywords to drive keyworded list, then having mini sites in a single project is probably best option.

Of course, I am typing this in a hurry, so there might be some other solutions.  I am also interested in hearing what other option people have tried.

-Jian

[Tim D]

It has been done. There are pros and cons. Typically if you want interlinking and referencing it would be a big plus for staying in one project if you are using Management Server only.

You mention the use of categories and Keywords. You can replicate those across projects but if you want to do cross project category linking there isn't really a way to do that well. This is where Delivery Server would come in handy you could publish the pages out to DS with the taxonomy mapped to attributes and use the Target DynaMent to do server side faceted listings. Even if you use ASP.Net you can publish a variant with meta-data to DS and provide a simple Target DynaMent service for your ASP.Net code.

Can you provide more details on what you want to achieve in cross project references?  I'd say it is likely a gap but may not be very impactful. It is of course possible to write a plugin or extension using RQL to provide some stand in for cross project references. The search in 10.x  is very powerful and you can leverage that for plugins to find pages cross project and information on them. We've implemented in the past, a permalink system using DS.  For you if you couple a project/site section name, page id, published page url as metadata in Delivery Server you can write a Target DynaMent that will be able to give you the relative URL of the requested page across multiple MS projects. In this way you could have search based mechanism that could be more portable should your URL patterns change. Reference links could then be calls to this service and have redirections provided or have ASP.Net or JavaScripts formulate links based on calls to a custom service built on the DynaMents in DS.

If you have heavy amounts of content reuse and adaptation across the site Content Distribution Services may be appropriate. It has a concept of a global pool of content people can pull from as needed across multiple projects. Updates can be manual or automatic.

On Friday, June 22, 2012 11:00:41 AM UTC-4, Tony Gayter wrote: