Sane approach to site-building? (+ good budget hosting?)
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Hi there (:
I'm in the early stages of making a website for a student organization at my faculty, and I'm reviewing publishing tools for them. I'm a "retired" C# programmer myself, and know a bit of PHP.
The site will be mostly unidirectionaly, pushing information out and having people sign up for courses through forms, so concrete5 seems just about right (:
I have two question though, steming from my inexperience with c5:
(a) Is the following a sane approach to building the c5 pages concerning events such, as courses the organisation arranges:
- Make a custom block type for courses which include iCal export, some custom google maps integration etc
- Make a custom block type for listing the data on the frontpage and around the site, which quiries data from the database using the database loader object provided by c5
- Make a page type "Course" which includes this block in defaults so that web editor can simply add this and change the data for each course
(b) My usual host (Domeneshop.no) runs slow with c5. This worries me a bit. Do you have any experience and reccomenations regarding good and speedy budget hosting for c5?
Best, Knut
I'm in the early stages of making a website for a student organization at my faculty, and I'm reviewing publishing tools for them. I'm a "retired" C# programmer myself, and know a bit of PHP.
The site will be mostly unidirectionaly, pushing information out and having people sign up for courses through forms, so concrete5 seems just about right (:
I have two question though, steming from my inexperience with c5:
(a) Is the following a sane approach to building the c5 pages concerning events such, as courses the organisation arranges:
- Make a custom block type for courses which include iCal export, some custom google maps integration etc
- Make a custom block type for listing the data on the frontpage and around the site, which quiries data from the database using the database loader object provided by c5
- Make a page type "Course" which includes this block in defaults so that web editor can simply add this and change the data for each course
(b) My usual host (Domeneshop.no) runs slow with c5. This worries me a bit. Do you have any experience and reccomenations regarding good and speedy budget hosting for c5?
Best, Knut
Thank you for you reply Stefan (: The more I look at the APIs and test the system I find it's the way to go. If we find a sufficiently powerful host, I think we'll go for a c5 solution with some custom blocks and a theme from the marketplace (:
Actually, I'm quite happy I found c5. The more popular competitors seems like hats you have to wear even if they don't fit.
Actually, I'm quite happy I found c5. The more popular competitors seems like hats you have to wear even if they don't fit.
I´m not a great developer, but I thing being a C# programmer you should be able to program a block for ical export, storing given data in the database, process them to form a nice list and so on. Documentation is great, so I think you will make it.
About the hosting: I run a virtual server on Ubuntu 8.04 with plesk, c5 is not very fast, but it is ok to me. Assure you run the correct settings for caching in C5 >5.4.1, that speeds up things a lot. You will find threads regarding "caching" in the forums that handle speed up stuff. If this will be your only C5-Page on a virtual server, I can tell that apc as caching library really speeds up things a lot.
There are problems though if you are running several C5-driven sites on one server using apc, I´m working on that and looking for help myself.
Just try it out, should be worth a try!
Kind regards,
Stefan from Germany