Tony Carnell

Hi all, I'm a newbie to PW but can definitely see the power and potential that it holds, but I have a question that I'd like your guy's opinions on to help steer me down the best path. I am working on a project to make a searchable catalogue of a certain type of dam, each one having in excess of 20 criteria that describes them, including name, owner, country, dimensions, construction dates, construction methods and statistics. I've imported the dam database into PW and it's created a Page called 'dams' with 497 children for all the dams (forgive me if I'm not using the correct terminology, as I say I am a newbie!). It's also created fields for all the different criteria. What I'm wondering is if this is the best way forward? When I take a look at the backend of the Skyscraper Demo site (which has the same kind of functionality that I'm hoping to employ) I see that there's separate pages for Architects and Cities. Is there a benefit in storing the information like this? Does it make the search functionality on the front-end more powerful or easier to create? Would it be best to have a separate page for Dam Owners and Countries for instance, or is having them simply as fields within the dam page enough to allow me to work with them easily? Thanks in advance for any help or advice you have to offer, and if there's any more information you need to know, just ask. Tony.

Wow, thanks for all your comments and suggestions guys. The ProcessWire community sure seems a friendly and helpful lot! I'll read through all the pointers you've given me and take it from there. You've certainly all given me plenty of food for thought. Thanks again, it's much appreciated. Tony.

Hi, I'll confess to having only just discovered ProcessWire, and am currently getting my head around the fundamental differences between it and other CMSs/CMFs I've used in the past. I'm very impressed with its potential though. I have a question however that I hope you guys can help me with. I'm involved in a project to implement a searchable database of dams from across the world (in fact something akin to the Skyscraper demo except that the dams will be searchable on many more criteria). We already have a database table containing all 600+ dams and I'm wondering how to import those into ProcessWire in a way that it can handle. Is it possible simply to add that table to the ProcessWire database and tell it how to interact with it, or will that complicate things further down the line? I don't fancy having to manually add all the dams to ProcessWire, since quite apart from the time and hassle it would also introduce human error. All advice is gratefully received Tony.