I'm planning to launch a new intranet site for one of my clients using FarCry 5.1 and they have multiple departments (like up to 60). Each department wants their own styling and has tons of content. I'm trying to figure out the best approach to installing and configuring the site(s).
Should I: A) Do one large install (one database) and use stylesheets to differentiate between the departments (I can make them all conform to similar layouts, so the diplay method options would be low - like 2 or 3 options)? - this is not as easy as it sounds (read on) B) Do I do separate installs for each department? There are pros and cons to each approach. The problem is that FarCry was never targeted to handle multiple sites from one install (I know many have done it (including myself), but it's always been a hacked solution). Here are a list of some Pros and Cons I could think of: ==Option A (Pros) * Managing one database (making FarCry upgrades easier in the future) * Easy for administrators to add new departments in the future (site tree additions and new categories) * Sharing content between departments (not really a concern for this client except for optional use on the main intranet homepage (but not a requirement)) ==Option A (Cons) * Shared content types get messy fast ** example: Media/Asset library lists all items for all departments. Sure I can use categories to help sort the data, but with 60 departments (some having 300+ PDFs and images) it would get a bit crazy. Same goes for things like News & Events. The only other option I could think of was to have a new type for each department (ie. dept1_news, dept2_news) - um, yeah... a bit messy with regards to code and DB, however the user experience would be manageable (they'd only see the content relevant to their security profiles). ==Option B (Pros) * Webtop is custom taylored to each department ==Option B (Cons) * Difficult for administrators to add new departments. Must install new FarCry website for every new department (it's possible I could create a skeleton with pre-defined settings to help alleviate the install - normally I'd create a sample DB and deploy that, however the skeleton deployment option makes things easy (it's a little broken in 5.1 though - hopefully it will be fixed before the 5.1 launch). * Multiple FarCry sites to manage and upgrade * Cannot easily share data between departments (not a large concern) I'd like to have option A, but I can just see it getting out of hand (regarding code and DB) without approaching it differently. Although I started the 1st site dev (for the first department) in a setup for Option A, I'm seriously considering going with option B (separate installs). If I go that route, I need to think about how I'm going to handle the master "intranet" site (the one that lists all of the department websites) and decide how best to deploy all of the sub- websites. Either way, I'm looking for any input from the community. Am I over- thinking this? Can anyone suggest a better approach? Note: The final site will likely have URLs similar to the following: http://intranet/departments/hr Regards, -- Jeff Coughlin Web Application Developer http://jeffcoughlin.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "farcry-dev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/farcry-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
