This is a somewhat of a repost of some previous post. I decided on an approach and wanted to gets some comments about it.

I believe we are talking about pMachine Pro.

We are a large condominium in the Northeast and we want to slowly provide a capability for our residents to use the internet for a series of transactions that take place with the ‘office’.

The first we are going after, because of the imagined simplicity, is a community bulletin board. This would have eleven classes of documents –
Emergency matters (Snow under 2 inches - no snow plowing; Board meeting tonight; trash days; etc.)
Office Communiqués (Forms for resident to print out, complete and snail mail to the ‘office’)
Official Matters (Board Minutes, Policies etc)
Community Matters (Bean Dinner at the Yacht Club and anything else that rivets us white hairs)
Directories (of residents) E-mail; Telephone; Addresses; Alphabetical
Special notices (insect spraying, road construction)
Community Reports (North Farm History, Committee reports – non time sensitive matters)
Welcome to Newcomers
Birthdays
Anniversaries
Obituaries

There are two separate types of matters. The first is documents with varying degrees of time sensitivity – bean supper on Saturday to board minutes for the current month to History – no end date.

The second is essentially directory queries to the on line database (MySQL)—Directories (of residents) E-mail; Telephone; Addresses; Alphabetical, Birthdays, Anniversaries.

So far so good – in fact simple. The queries to the database are a low priority matter and do not seem as daunting at this point. What has caused a lot of rumination is the documents. They are MS Word documents. Pre Web site—resident types up a document and delivered the hard copy to the office. The folks in the office Xeroxed copies and distributed to the 300 resident post boxes.

We are getting rid of the copying and delivery, but we will not allow the residents the ability to post to the web site. Given some of our literacy rates this would be calamitous, mega disastrous, beyond.

How do we get the Word documents our web site?  The plan is for the resident to deliver electronic copy via e-mail or sneaker net to the office. The document would be converted to html and run through a Microsoft filter application that takes a lot to their html nonsense out. The document, with a specific file name would be uploaded to a specific directory on our ISPs server.

This is the interesting part for me. We would make a entry into the pMachine weblog MySQL database not into pMachine itself. This entry would contain the file name (as above); a headline and a brief teaser from the document. This is in addition to the other information required for a weblog entry – I checked out the database and can’t remember all but document class, start date and end date are three that come to mind.

We’ve had success linking MS Access to MySQL so that most likely will be the agent to communicate Weblog entries to the MySQL database on our ISP’s server.

When the weblog entries are initiated by pMachine we’ll arrange it such that there is the headline, the teaser and a link (using the file name) to the relevant document. Functionally this should work like a news digest page -  news.google.com for instance.

Users interested in the entry would read the headline, the teaser and activate (click) the link to reach the html document. 

Questions.
Is this a reasonable scenario?
Is there a better scenario?
Do you agree that pMachine Pro is the most appropriate product?
Do you have a reference customer who basically accomplishes what we are trying to do – I have a committee that needs convincing and a reference site would help?

Thanks – you guys are doing a great job.

So pM will be used as a directory that lists all the available articles and each article will be an actual HTML file.

There is nothing that will prevent pM or EE from accomplishing this, however it seems a little odd that you’d bother uploading the actual HTML file when you can post the data as part of the entry itself.  You can set-up your templates so that the articles can be viewed on a different page.

I just don’t see the benefit of storing hundreds (or thousands) of HTML files on your server when you have a MySQL database at your disposal - a database that can be searched, sorted, and used for multiple output formats, like printer-friendly pages, RSS feeds, etc.

Thank you.

You have a good point. The process that uploaded new documents would also be tasked to clean out (erase) documents whose ‘sell by’ date has expired so the load on the server is not that great. Our server budget is 10 meg and I’m determined to stay under that otherwise our costs will escalate.

That all aside, the reason for the html document is that the residents will be able to see their efforts with Word translated into a document on the Web. I thought this would encourage participation.

If you are saying that the html document with its formating could be stored in pMachine or EE then your point has completely won the day as the upload process could clean up the tables it uploaded to in the first place.

Although you can submit a full web page with HTML formatting as an entry in EE, I don’t think you want to do that.

Remember that EE will automatically format your content for you, based on which option you select.  The default option, called “Auto XHTML”, will automatically add semantically correct HTML to your submitted content.  Paragraphs will be wrapped in <p></p> tags, etc…

Therefore, I would recommend that you submit the articles as pure text - no markup - and let EE do the formatting for you.  That way your database will contain pure content.  Not only will you be storing less content this way but ultimately you will have much, much more flexibility. 

By submitting HTML markup with your content you will be limiting the article to one layout. What happens if down the road you decide you want a different layout?  Or what if you want two version of each article?  For example, one version might be more optimized for printers, while the other might be better for web viewing.  Or what if you want an XML version?  Or what if you want a version that can be accessed with PDAs?  Or what if you want to show a summary of each article with only the first X number of words?  Etc.  Unless your content is stored a pure content none of this will be possible.

The separation of content from presentation is the cornerstone concept behind systems like EE.  Keep your content pure and unadulterated and let the template engine show it formatted in whatever variety of ways you need.

Excellent agruement—I have enough now that the decisions are OK no matter which way we go.

Thanks for your help