I work for a company that manufactures sunrooms and we have a network of dealers all over the country. I created a template for our niche market which consists primarily of contractors who might just sell our product but lots of times has other services unrelated to sunrooms. I built a template that allows them to take control of some or all of the content of their site. They can add products on the fly which then adds: 1..A product page for that product to the submenu for products 2..A photo gallery page for that product to the submenu for galleries 3..A checkbox in their request for info page for that product
They have an rich text editor for every header of all their main lever menu pages, home, about us etc. and in some cases the header is the complete page content like say the about us page. They also have a meta tag area to enter their page title, meta description, and keywords for each of these pages. They have that same rich text editor to use to create their product pages and also the same goes for those pages meta tags as above. They have an upload page that allows them to upload the gallery images and select the gallery they go to. I use the imagecr tag to resize any Image that is greater in size then a size I set in the config. They have a before/after page that they can upload up to 4 images of a job they have completed anlong with text describing that job. There is a share this page with a friend button on these pages to allow the homeowners who go online to see their home on the internet share their pictures with friends, which drives in referrals. They have a contact use page which adds below the contact us header for them to add any public email addresses they want. They have a slideshow flash object that allows then to upload pictures that are then resized to fit and are added on the fly to the xml file that controls the show. They have a scroller object where they can add any time sensitive text to a scroller on the home page. Now here's the part that I like that make the site zip along....They have a button to rewrite all the pages to HTML which usually takes under 3 seconds to run and they have search engine friendly html pages for everything except for the request for info page that sends a cfmail. I have had very good success with this approach and am adding features all the time. All I do to create a new site is copy the template folder to where I host it and change the domain name variable and a couple other things like make the main level menu to go with the color scheme of their logo and a footer which puts a search engine friendly text menu at the bottom of each page. If anyone wants to have more detail on this approach I am not against sharing as long as you don't plan on competing with me <smile>. BTW I host it on 5,6.1, and 7 without any issues yet. Terry Troxel -----Original Message----- From: Rick Faircloth [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 1:19 PM To: CF-Talk Subject: Constructing multi-user/multi-site applications... Ok.so I'm getting hammered as a custom designer/developer by sites such as Z57.com (a real estate service/site provider) because they can set up sites for their clients on-the-fly. I develop custom sites, one-at-a-time.cost is much greater, time-to-live is longer, so some of my clients are starting to question whether or not they should go with the template-driven, packaged solutions of Z57.com or Realtor.com. There are two approaches to development at this point. One, build complete sites as templates and sell the templates, each as a complete site with separate database, etc. Two, build one application which uses variables for everything on the site, and store them in a database, and by using the CGI variable to check for the domain name requested (CGI.Server_Name?), set all the variables accordingly and have the site application load all the appropriate content for the site. The question.which way is best? Will the "One Application to Rule Them All" approach cause a much greater drain on my server? Will the dynamic site approach be slower in responsiveness? Separate sites are much simpler, but I have to get directly involved with each client to do that. With one application to dynamically build sites, I can set it up and watch it run, setting up sites for clients on the fly. Anyone doing this kind of thing? Thoughts? Thanks, Rick PS - Remember, right now (and hopefully until CF 8 comes out) I want to run this on CF 4.5. I don't want to through a time-consuming learning curve for CF 7, with the release of CF 8 coming soon to a server near you. I know if I build it with 4.5 now, I'll have to rebuild it with CF 8 again later, but I would have time to get to know CF 8 better first. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Introducing the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update. 80 pages of hard-hitting, up-to-date ColdFusion information by your peers, delivered to your door four times a year. http://www.fusionauthority.com/quarterly Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:258209 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
