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For this site I wanted a simple Web site content management system that was easy to use and allowed me to realise a few key publishing requirements. From line one of coding it I realised I needed to fit the content into a sensible and flexible structure whose detail was not fully apparent.
The structure would need to be able to re-organise and re-classify aticles, information and data etc.
It has to be a flexible structure in such a way that it can be driven by the data itself, much of which is not known in advance allowed me to create, publish and manage a number of articles and itself be easy to extend in unforseen directions and manage ay number and type of unforeseen digital media . This site is one of several "front ends" now driven by this new system.
The menu on the left is generated from a database; each is a record that reflects the main categories I wanted. It is possible to have as many of your own categories as you desire although for practical purposes it's not a good idea to present a list that is too big, so lets say if the list is to go on the side of the screen ( it could go across the top also ) then perhaps 30-50 categories could be used.
Each category can have as many items in it as are required.
Straight to the heart of it, each item is a page full of information that fits the design (look) you have chosen for the site. Sticking with categories for now though, it is acknowledge that it is a good idea to have categories to store and organise information and products and such like.
Part of this Articles online Creation panel
So the database is designed in such a way that it is possible to add a parent category to any existing category if the need should ever arise.
So the 30 or more categories that might appear down the side of the (e.g. left) might themselves be added to some parent category you choose.
The point here to grasp is that the categorisation is flexible, you might for example decide to present fifty categories as five parent categories each of which has ten sub-categories in it, there are a large number of combinations possible, the number depending upon the number of items, products, pages of information etc that you want to present on your site.
So categories can be added easily and the list on the left would just get longer. I also needed a system where it's easy to assign an item to a category, in my case an item is a page of information such as this one you are reading now. It's equally important to be able to re-assign an item to another different category if required, which can happen quite often