PW Best Practices - Need your expertise and opinions!

[zgjonbalaj]

We've been using PW since 2.3 for a lot of our websites and have found it to be suitable in almost any scenario it just seems there is nothing it cant handle. The clients love it because its easy to use and very intuitive. The Pro Forms module has also made our lives just a little easier when it comes to creating front end forms.  Every now and then we come across a problem and we've always found a way to make it work with PW. With that said, I was hoping to get an idea from other developers what their approach is and what might be the best route to choose in terms of best practices in the following scenarios.

1. Repeaters or Pages

We know that repeaters are essentially pages living under the admin tree. In a case where there may not be that many repeatable items we want to maybe just allow the client to create sub-pages (children) under a specific page in the back end. We always wondered if this is a good idea since we don't want the visitor, search engine bots, etc to be able to crawl or view those pages directly. Whats the best option here? Unpublished? Hidden? Template without file? Essentially how do we create pages that can be pulled by the api but do not serve any other purpose such as no url, not visible on the front end, etc?

2. Assets

We just recently built a site where our client had several hundred in assets varying in type such as webinars (video template), white-papers (direct pdf download), podcasts (direct mp3 download), success stories (regular html template) etc. We created an unpublished page in the root and had 5 published children underneath that page considered as type. SEO value was important to us for all of these assets. How do you guys normally handle these types of assets what is the proper approach in PW.

3. Drafts

We've posted this question before and seems its under development but im wondering how do you handle a scenario where you need to preview changes on the home page for example before pushing it live? We tried the ProcessPreview Module but that doesnt seem to work well with our custom classes and functions. Basically our client needs to make changes to a page send a link for approval and only once it is approved apply the changes. For other pages we normally duplicate it add a "v2" at the end and keep it unpublished, send the url, get the approval and then either merge the changes manually or delete the original entirely and rename the v2 to the original name then publish it. This process is tedious and it doesn't work for the home page.

I may have been vague in my questioning but i hope you get my general point. Im just looking for some direction and assistance on how to approach these scenarios.

[LostKobrakai]

1. is easy: If there's no corresponding template.php for a template, than nobody can see it from outside. Furthermore, the only thing a search engine can crawl is the html you're outputting in your templates, so those children could even have template.php files, but not output markup and e.g. redirect to 404 on direct access.

2. If SEO is important I'd go with a one-page-per-asset approach, so you've all the flexibility to show and use those assets in the way you want. 

3. Drafts is still an issue, that I doubt will be fully solved until a core solution is introduced.

[LostKobrakai]

A preview and rough timeline for the drafts module: http://processwire.com/blog/posts/processwire-2.6.13-and-a-preview-of-prodrafts/