Hi,

 

New here. I have been tasked with finding a cms solution for a large website - ultimate dallas com

 

It's a popular fans site but its large with 100s of pages and subsections. I help out and have basic knowledge of Wordpress so we will probably have to get someone to do this for us.

 

But is it possible to recreate all that in a cms?

 

Thanks for your help

Yes, it is absolutely possible.

Yes, it is absolutely possible.

 

Thanks. Is it possible in wordpress? I have looked at themes which on the homepage look fine but once you start creating the sub pages etc they don't really fit, but thats with my limited understanding.

 

Is it a case of hiring a designer/coder to create it and then I just populate it? I don't really know where to begin.

Is it, but as you've seen it will take a bit of work to re-create such a site. If you don't have development experience then you could find and hire a web developer with experience in this kind of project; I'd suggest searching for developers near you and getting some quotes

Welcome to the forums.

 

I'd say it really depends how you want to manage and manipulate all the content. You have several types of content, such as news, episodes, characters, cast, interviews and so on.

 

Would you want to be able to automatically generate pages from your content data for say:

 

1. an episode page where:

 

Page shows all characters that appeared in episode 24

- where each character has a link to their character profile page

--- the linked page also shows all the episode they have appeared in

- where each character has a link to page of their interviews

--- the linked page shows all interviews they have made

 

or

 

2. a character profile page that shows:

 

- their actor profile

- their cast profile

- a list of episodes they appeared in

- a list of interviews they have done

- a list of news items they are mentioned in

- photos of the actor

- photos of the character

Welcome to the forums.

 

I'd say it really depends how you want to manage and manipulate all the content. You have several types of content, such as news, episodes, characters, cast, interviews and so on.

 

Would you want to be able to automatically generate pages from your content data for say:

 

1. an episode page where:

 

Page shows all characters that appeared in episode 24

- where each character has a link to their character profile page

--- the linked page also shows all the episode they have appeared in

- where each character has a link to page of their interviews

--- the linked page shows all interviews they have made

 

or

 

2. a character profile page that shows:

 

- their actor profile

- their cast profile

- a list of episodes they appeared in

- a list of interviews they have done

- a list of news items they are mentioned in

- photos of the actor

- photos of the character

 

wow yes this is the kind of thing I was thinking about and my brain started to melt. With over 300 episodes and so much content it feels a huge task.

 

I would want to push users to other relevent pieces of content. At a basic level all actor names and character names would be linked to their pages and I guess links to relevent news content and the interviews.

 

Maybe I need to plan it out. I'm not overly technical but I learn prtty fast, just not great with design. We are not allowed to make money so it's self funded but needs to happen. I guess for starters I should scope out exactly what the requirements are and how we want it to work and then get quotes.

I'm not sure about how you would approach it with the more popular content systems but ExpressionEngine excels at handling that sort of content where data can have many different "relationships" and cross referencing.

 

For the sort of content you have you'd create different "channels" for your content, then in each channel make "relationships" to related data. For instance you'd probably need channels for:

 

1. Characters

2. Actors

3. Episodes

4. Interviews

5. News

 

In your Episodes channel you'd set up custom fields for the content such as:

1. Episode number/season

2. Episode date/year

3. Episode description

4. Select all characters that appear in the episode (from your Characters channel), you can use this data to link to character pages

5. Select all actors that appear in the episode (from your Actors channel), you can use this data to link to actor pages

 

In your Actors channel you'd set up custom fields for:

1. Actor name

2. Select character(s) played by this actor (options come from your Characters channel)

3. Actor DOB

4. Actor description

5. Actor main photo/image

 

... you can add as many custom fields for your data as you need, want three different photos to use in different contexts? just add three image fields.

 

In these two examples the "Select..." field examples create relationships between the two types of data - ie creating relationships between actors, characters, and episodes - you can then use this data to:

a) list all characters that appear in any episode (on an episode page)

list all actors that appear in any episode (on an episode page)

c) list all episodes an actor has appeared in (on an actor page)

c) list all episodes a character has appeared in (on an character page)

 

As your site is non-commercial/not fof profit there is a free version of ExpressionEngine you can use. As with any CMS there is a learning curve!

Thanks for the recommendations. I guess I am a little worried stepping outside one of the big cms's in terms of support and the costs associated with finding somone to take it on. What are your thoughts on Drupal as a solution?