Content Management by Error

[franzo]

Hi,

I'm currently working on an application and need to do some content management
for the front end.

To keep the system dynamic and flexible I want to keep all page content in a
DB. My idea is to use the CF error handling to display the content.
If a content page is called (doesn't exist as a page, only in the DB) the
"page not found" error page is called, but instead of showing an error I want
to evaluate the URL, retrieve the page content for that URL from the DB, and
then display that page like there is no error but it is supposed to work like
that.

Does anybody have any idea how much overhead that would create, compared to a
system where the pages are rendered into physical files, and the pages can be
called without going through the error handling?

Any data, ideas or feedback would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Fober ;)

[shp.jc]

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to solve.

Part of the message sounds like users will effectively be going to static
pages (e.g., aPage.cfm). If the page is not on the file system, you want to
pull it from the database, save it to the file system and then redirect the
user to the newly-created file.

If this is what you're trying to do, I'd just ftp aPage.cfm and keep it simple.

If, on the other hand, you have a design template and you want to change the
contents of the page dynamically (like a story at a newspaper's website), the
layout file should exist on the file system and you'd pass it a doc_id to
retrieve the story from the db.

This is a perfectly good solution to the problem.

If I've completely misunderstood you, I still wouldn't recommend a content
management system based on throwing errors. Performance would take a hit.
Your error logs would swell, obscuring real errors. And the next guy
supporting it would probably be dizzy trying to manage the site.