I am on a team of developers at a real estate financial magazine with an online presence in the form of multiple daily articles; approximately 16-20 articles a day currently. Our current online site is powered by WordPress and we have at last count 15,430+ WP "posts".

We are currently looking at SilverStripe to power the new "3.0" version of the site, but all parties concerned; authors, editors, management, and developers are concerned with how to organize the admin section to allow easy navigation of that many "Pages".

Even with using categories, tags, and other common front end methods to separate content, that many pages in the site tree will make things hard to find and will lead to frustration of the writers and editorial staff. Is there a better storage and/or navigation structure? Should we use custom DataObjects for the articles rather than "Pages" and if so, what about SEO URL's for the data objects? We like the way the URL's are constructed for pages.

Does anyone have any SilverStripe knowledge and/or experience with this much content that could give us some insight on the best way to structure the data? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Have a look at these tutorials for using custom DataObjects as pages (the site has many other great tutorials that you would probably like to look at too for your new site!)

http://www.ssbits.com/tutorials/2010/dataobjects-as-pages-part-1-keeping-it-simple/

http://www.ssbits.com/tutorials/2010/dataobjects-as-pages-part-2-using-model-admin-and-url-segments-to-create-a-product-catalogue/

Hi r0nn1ef

I have a website with more than 700 pages now and counting. We are using the sitetree menu for this and it works. Of course a good structure and tidiness is a key issue if it has to work, but it is possible.

You could perhaps use modelAdmin for your many pages as DataObjects.

Good luck with the site.

Joel

And to help you get started with ModelAdmin...

http://doc.silverstripe.org/sapphire/en/reference/modeladmin
http://www.silverstripe.org/making-a-crm-with-modeladmin-in-silverstripe-230/

Though not directly related to the problem of managing thousands of articles in the site tree, something that you might want to keep in mind when coming over to SilverStripe from Wordpress is the connector that SilverStripe Australia has recently built (https://github.com/ajshort/silverstripe-wordpressconnector). At the moment it migrates Wordpress blog items across to SS's BlogEntry data objects, and Wordpress pages over as Page data objects, which might not be an ideal scenario if you're wanting to avoid filling the site tree with items. Also, it's only been built to work on smaller Wordpress systems, and would likely need some restructuring to work with thousands of posts at a time. Anyway, instead of telling you why you shouldn't use it, I'll let you check it out yourself and seeing if it might be useful :)

Hi @Marcus,

I cannot get the Wordpress Connector module to import at all. and am not getting any error messages so I'm quite frustrated.

I have installed:

1. SilverStripe Blog module (v0.4.1)
2. External Content module (v0.2.4)
3. Wordpress Connector module (v0.1) (folder is named wordpressconnector as instructed)
4. A fresh install of Wordpress v3.1.2 with the content I want imported in its database

I have rebuilt the SS database with no errors. Everything looks good in the CMS.

Now, I can’t seem to find any detailed instructions on how to go about doing the actual import, and it seems fairly self-explanatory so on the External Content tab I:

1. Created new WordpressPostContentSource (I only need the Posts)
2. In my WordpressPostContentSource, I have the following settings:
a. Wordpress Base URL: http://www.clickfox.com/blog/
b. Wordpress Blog ID: 0 (verified as correct)
c. Working credentials
e. Blog to import into: Blog (verified exists in CMS)

When I click on the “Start Importing” button, I get the green ajax message “Starting import to Blog...” at the bottom of the screen—for a few seconds—but then nothing ever happens after that and I don’t get any errors and nothing is imported. What am I missing?

Thanks in advance,
Garrett

I have the same problem - were you able to solve it? if so, how?

Yes, XML-RPC services were disabled on the site from which I was importing. An admin user can enable them at http://yoursite.com/blog/wp-admin/options-writing.php.

//Garrett