CMS Best Practices - XML/XSL

[T0mm0]

Hi guys,

I'm developing a small content management system that's going to involve users generating HTML content to:
1) Be sent as email content
2) Be published to a new web page

Once these have been sent/published there will be no further editing of that content.

I'm using asp .net 2.0 and SQL server 2000.

What are your thoughts as to:

1) Store xhtml in database as text (no xml datatype available since it's sql200) or as flat xml files outside of a database?

2) Should I store the data as xml and transform it with xsl on a request for a page to be written to the response? Or should I pre-transform the xml to a final html file ready for when the user requests it? I expect to have large numbers of users accessing the web pages at a time and am looking for the quickest/most rhobust way to do it.

thanks in advance

[jkmyoung]

1) How many files do you have? How indexable do you want it to be? Usually text in the database is a better option.

2) This also depends on the usage of your users. Are your users hitting the same pages over and over again? Are there many pages that will never be viewed?

If all of the pages are likely to be viewed, then transform all of them at once, saving on the time that it takes to generate the xslt processor over and over. Then store the xhtml result.

If few of the pages are likely to be viewed, then transform the xml only when needed.

If some pages are likely to be repeatedly viewed, (eg by multiple users), then after transforming the xml into xhtml, store the xhtml result. Only reperform the transform if the xml is updated and the xml's timestamp is more up to date than the result xhtml's time, or the result xhtml does not exist.