EW 4: Best method for archiving News page

[poida]

Hello, this is my first post to this group; thanks in advance.
I have a News page that changes every couple of weeks. The News page has links from various navigation buttons and menus. As the news is updated, I enter text and images to the existing News.html, but how should I archive the news page that has just been replaced? Should I just rename it to News45678.html for instance, then manually add that page's link to a summary page, or should I store the page in a database? It would be nice if a database could display a summary of archived news pages, so the user could use a combo box or drop down menu to navigate to that page. If not the page, then maybe the page's date and summary text could go in a tiny database. I am hoping for something simple.

[Cheryl D Wise]

If you are hoping for simple then saving the existing page with a new name, for news items I like simply adding the date so if I were archiving this page it would be 2011-02-15topic375.html.

If you intend to keep this up and have many years of archiving in the future a database would be a good way to go but setting it up would not be so simple. You would have to create your database, create a front-end on the website to pull material from the database, create a back-end to put your content in the database and populate it with all the existing content by date to create your archives. I suspect there are applications already built that you can find at places like hotscripts.com that already do that but you'd still need to customize it to fit with your site.

The easiest way to do that is to use a blog like WordPress or BlogEngine.NET (which as the option to use xml files instead of a database) but you would still have the issue of migrating old content into it.

[poida]

Thanks for the tips Cheryl - I've taken that on board. If I use an HTML only option, I am worried about renaming the News.HTML page to anything, as doing so might reconfigure all the existing navigation links.
Would it be preferable to (1) copy and paste the content of News.HTML into the file to be archived, or (2) just click on Save as...? My concern here is maintaining the links to the News.HTML page.
Regards & TIA

[paladin]

The simplest way that would not affect existing links (presuming you are managing the site with hidden metadata) would be to right click the file in EW's Folder List panel and copy and paste it. (Might want to paste it into a separate folder in the Folder List called "archives," for organizational purposes.) EW will automatically append "_copy(1)" to the filename, before the extension. This should have no effect on the existing file or links to it, since it still exists with the same name.

You can then edit the filename of the copy, replacing the "_copy(1)" with whatever scheme you decide to use for your archival copies—issue date, vol#_issue#, serial#, whatever... If you think about it a bit, you might be able to come up with a scheme which is naturally ASCII-sortable (e.g. vol-3_issue-4), so the archives appear in folder and other listings in chronological publication order. Just a thought...

Doing it would probably actually take less time than describing it, and you then have a consistent naming scheme that will work going forward, and can be adapted to a database schema later, if you wish.  ;-)

cheers,
scott

[Cheryl D Wise]

I don't think it matters. I'd probably use "save as" then reopen the original file and update that page with the new content. As Scott said the most important thing is to use a consistent naming convention for the files as you save them to a new name.

[Cheryl D Wise]

One other suggestion, if you want to have a listing of available archives use an include page for it and then you only need to update the page that is called by the include. I'd use a server side include so you don't have to publish all the pages using the include but design time can also work if you are uncertain how to use a server side include.

[poida]

Thanks for the responses.

Cheryl said : <<use an include page for it>>. I'm not sure how or why to use an include file. The site is straight HTML, and I have seen references to include files with PHP, but that won't be the case. I don't see having to upload the Archives page as a problem, but your response suggests that it might have to upload\publish many other pages, if an include file isn't used. Is that what happens?