I have a lot of work to do on the database. I'm still in the process of setting up the tables. Trying to determine all the information that will be required to run this thing is certainly a challenge. I think I'm actually pretty close to being done with the table setup (I'll attach a diagram next time). But once that's done I'll still need to set up all the stored procedure, views, and relationships. One thing of note, I decided to use the GUID feature for the external ID so that it's not as predictable as it would be otherwise. Internal linking will still be done via the autoincrement ID. I doubt the ID problem will be too much of a problem anyway because I'd like to do something similar to what I've done for the intranet authentication scripts (cookie does not contain identifying information but points to a file containing the user ID).
I still haven't quite decided on some of the issues that will need to be addressed. Such as:
- how much information we will have access to from a user-created entry
- how do we handle staff updates of a user-created or user-owned entry
- how will the e-mail list system be set up (especially for lists with an HTML option)
- if we use external list management software will we be able to integrate it with the user database
And I have about a week to get all this done :(
