Flexible site structure with CakePHP Andy Gale www.andy-gale.com Wednesday, 29 May 13 

T3 A gadget, technology and lifestyle magazine Wednesday, 29 May 13 

T3 Internationally licensed... Wednesday, 29 May 13 

T3 Pioneering interactive iPad magazine Wednesday, 29 May 13 

T3 Future Publishing • A popular title on Zino - an online publishing platform www.zinio.com • Also a popular UK website destination for gadget fans www.t3.com Wednesday, 29 May 13 

T3 Future Publishing • Flagship brand for Future Publishing • T3 Awards being an important part of the UK calendar • Many competitors - online, blogs such as Engadget and Gizmodo • Quick-to-publish vital on gadget websites Wednesday, 29 May 13 

T3 - Just use Drupal or Wordpress! • Many Future websites now in Drupal or Wordpress www.pcgamer.com www.netmagazine.com • Pressflow (a distribution of Drupal) is an excellent platform for publishing websites pressflow.org • Drupal and Pressflow with Varnish scales www.varnish-cache.org Wednesday, 29 May 13 

T3 - Just use Drupal or Wordpress? • No need to build another CMS? • But the site editors had unique requirements for their workflow Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Easy to update trending and ticker Editable custom content boxes Popular list features need to be fast and easy to create Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Various different types of galleries including super galleries! Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Flexible site structure • Obviously, articles, galleries, other lists of content are stored in database • We also stored the site structure in the database using the Tree behaviour. Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Editable custom content boxes Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Elements CREATE TABLE elements ( ! id INTEGER(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, ! name VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT '', ! PRIMARY KEY (id) ); Model: Name field, just the filename of a CakePHP element

SiteObject id: 1 name: Latest smartphone news type: ContentBox element_id: 1 content_id: 50 Element id: 1 name: content_boxes/list.ctp SiteObject id: 50 name: Latest smartphone news list type: List SiteObject id: 51 type: List parent_id: 50 article_id: 1 Article id: 1 name: Black Samsung Galaxy S3 coming soon Article id: 2 name: Motorola RAZAR Ice Cream Sandwich update out now SiteObject id: 52 type: List parent_id: 50 article_id: 2 SiteObject id: 53 type: List parent_id: 50 article_id: 3 Article id: 3 name: Supposed Apple iPhone 5 motherboard hints at features Wednesday, 29 May 13 

SiteObject id: 1 name: Samsung Galaxy Note 2: Hands On type: ContentBox element_id: 2 article_id: 4 Element id: 2 name: content_boxes/hero.ctp Article id: 4 name: Black Samsung Galaxy S3 coming soon Hero article content box Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Tree Behaviour id: 1 left: 1, right: 10 id: 2 parent: 1 left: 2, right: 7 id: 4 parent: 2 left: 5, right: 6

& logo id: 3 parent: 2 left: 3, right: 4 id: 5 parent: 1 left: 8, right: 13 id: 7 parent: 5 left: 11, right: 12 id: 6 parent: 5 left: 9, right: 10 book.cakephp.org/1.3/en/view/1339/Tree Wednesday, 29 May 13 

So what about the structure? All page elements were grouped together as different types of “site object” CREATE TABLE site_objects ( ! id INTEGER(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, ! parent_id INTEGER(10) UNSIGNED DEFAULT NULL, ! lft INTEGER(10) UNSIGNED DEFAULT NULL, ! rght INTEGER(10) UNSIGNED DEFAULT NULL, ! name VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT '',! ! page_id INTEGER(10) UNSIGNED DEFAULT NULL, ! article_id INTEGER(10) UNSIGNED DEFAULT NULL, ! element_id INTEGER(10) UNSIGNED DEFAULT NULL, ! content_id INTEGER(10) UNSIGNED DEFAULT NULL, ! PRIMARY KEY (id) ); Page CREATE TABLE pages ( ! id INTEGER(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, ! name VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT '',! ! title VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT '',! ! meta_description TEXT DEFAULT ! meta_keywords TEXT DEFAULT NULL, ! name VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT '',! ! url VARCHAR(255) DEFAULT '',! ! PRIMARY KEY (id) ); Wednesday, 29 May 13 

URLs • The structure of each “Page” or URL was defined in a tree • /news takes you to the page structure for news articles • /news/new-iphone5-released takes you to the page structure associated with the new articles that has the slug “new-iphone5-released” allowing different layouts for articles from trades shows Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Content? • element_id field contains a reference to the element that should be used to display this content • content_id field in SiteObject refers to another SiteObject which contains information about where to find the content • That content could be a list of articles, images, a carousel... anything that the site supports Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Content? • Backend process updates lists periodically • Key lists such as the homepage lists of articles are updated whenever articles change • Allows easy updating of caching. See: andy-gale.com/positive-cache-clearing-with-cakephp.html Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Caching!!!!!! • Caching vital when implementing a site using this methodology • Structure and content both SiteObjects can be cached in the same way • Caching need to be updated fast to ensure new articles were published as soon as possible Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Caching CMS ActiveMQ Cache update sent as a topic via STOMP protocol Web server Web server Web server Multiple clients can subscribe to a topic so all web servers that are listening can update their cache immediately and serve new content Wednesday, 29 May 13 

CSS, elements and flexible Structure • Consistent CSS style guide for each component vital for implementing a flexible site structure • Elements should work wherever they are placed • Twitter Bootstrap is a great example twitter.github.com/bootstrap/ Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Flexible site structure with CakePHP • Code to be released on my GitHub page shortly: github.com/salgo/ • Avoiding Surprises with Chef and Vagrant Attend if you’ve ever had problems with configuration or anything else when putting sites live Wednesday, 29 May 13 

Flexible site structure with CakePHP • Questions? • @andygale on Twitter • andy-gale.com on the Web Wednesday, 29 May 13