What to do? Intranet structure question.

[drinc2much]

Let me just start out by saying that I am a Java webapp developer. I
was pulled into rebuilding our intranet site. I have limited
experience with what is the best method for structuring an intranet
site.

We have a pretty big (~1000 pages) intranet site that has completly
gone to crap. The person that was in charge of the site has left the
company. Now that she is gone, they have come to me to revamp the look
and feel of the site. So I built a mock up template of the new site,
built my style sheets and such, and the new look and feel has been
approved.
We are planning on converting the old site to the new site, by pulling
a page at a time, slapping the css on it, and putting it into some of
the templates I have built.
Now here is my qestion:

What is the best way to structure/build a website of this size? In the
past I have built small sites, and used SSI to include common pieces
to most of the pages. I have started to design a large directory
structure to do this same thing with, and it just seems like it will
get out of hand.
Is there a better solution to manage a site of this size? I good
amount (70%) of the leaf or end pages will be .pdf documents, such as
offer letters, forms, stuff like that.

I just today looked at a CMS solution (OpenCms) and I think that is
kinda cool. However, how hard is it to build in css support, ssi
support and all that into a CMS? I guess just using cms tags to import
all that, right?

So what do people with about the same site website use? Also, what
kind of time commitment would implementing a CMS of this size, over a
file structure site be?

Thanks for your help.

Chris

[Peter Foti]

"drinc2much" <dr********@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:8a************************@posting.google.com ...

What is the best way to structure/build a website of this size? In the
past I have built small sites, and used SSI to include common pieces
to most of the pages. I have started to design a large directory
structure to do this same thing with, and it just seems like it will
get out of hand.
Is there a better solution to manage a site of this size? I good
amount (70%) of the leaf or end pages will be .pdf documents, such as
offer letters, forms, stuff like that.

I just today looked at a CMS solution (OpenCms) and I think that is
kinda cool. However, how hard is it to build in css support, ssi
support and all that into a CMS? I guess just using cms tags to import
all that, right?

My suggestion would be to write out a logical hierarchy to determine where
to store files, and to create all of your links/includes/images/etc. using
paths relative to the root of the site. For example, you might create a
directory called /images to store all of your image files, and a directory
called /scripts to store all of your script files.

As for OpenCms... my only word of warning is that this seems to have a
WYSIWYG editor, which I would suggest avoiding like the plague. WYSIWYG
editors will typically insert a bunch of invalid code into your document
(though I have no experience with this particular editor). But on the other
hand, if you have little experience and/or have a pending deadline and just
need to get something working, then perhaps the pros would outweigh the cons
for you.

Good luck,
Peter Foti