[Tutor] Dynamically naming functions

[Alan Gauld]

> > Very rarely, its easy to do backups of huge amounts of data if you
> > know where to find it, its hard to trawl all over a changing structure
> > looking for the things that need backing up. Particularly if, when you
> > try to restore it, it needs to go in a different place to where you 
> > found
> > it!
>
> Backing up is generally one of the lesser of my worries.

Backing up is usually a no brainer, especially in a static structure,
but even in a dynamic one you can just do a find on the file types.
It's restoring a dynamic structure thats really hard, and usually a
manual process...

> Maintaining content is primary.

Oddly enough I usually expect content maintenance to be a
'business as usual' kind of thing. The content goes in one place
per author and the code picks it up as needed.

> Unless you are dynamically generating static pages,
> they are a nightmare to maintain.

If the content is dynamic in any way I always generate them dynamically
- and that includes anything with company logo etc on it. About the only
pure html pages I use are the Error reports - 404s etc...

> be quite repetitive.  A large amount of the code on any page is the
> same as on any other page (page structure, boilerplate, etc).

But most of that is template code just picking up content from a folder
someplace (logo images, standard menus etc) and CSS style settings.

> I think it's a generally accepted principle that computers are better
> at handling thousands of files like that better than humans are.  The

Absolutely.

> > Yes but a CMS normally uses a static structure with dynamic content.
> I think we might be using different meanings of structure.  I'm
> referring to the site structure, as in which page is a parent of which
> other page.  The site structure is just another aspect of the content.

Ah, OK. I'm referring to the physical site structure, the folder heirarchy.

> A reference to the parent/child pages is just another attribute like
> content and title.

Agreed, I'd expect those to be managed in the code and templates.

> A (good) CMS would create a dynamic structure for the user to browse,
> with folders and pages easily creatable and movable,

I'm not sure I agree with that. It should allow movement of pages across
folders with auto update iof relative paths etc, but not necessarily dynamic
(ie at run time) changes.

> and references to pages would be dynamic so that if yo0u move a
> page internal links to it still work.

I don;t necessarily see that as needing to be a dynamic feature, I'd
probably prefer to do those kinds of changes under controlled
circumstances and do the updates as a batch update process.

>> Dynamic content is 'A Good Thing', dynamic structure is usually bad.
>
> But structure is just an aspect of content.

If you mean navigation structure I agree, but physical structure - where
the files live is absolutely not. And to make it so creates a huge headache
for the site administrators - who usually cost a good deal more than
the developers or content providers!

Alan G.