GREAT Frontier Web Site for May 4, 1998 CuisineNet Frontier is so flexible that it can almost do everything you would want for content management.

Graphic Design: Kam On Cheung

Frontier Scripting: Kam On Cheung, kcheung@cyberpalate.com

Web Team:
Joe Cravo, Technology Director
Jeremy H. Jeffers, Editor
Kian Lam Kho, President

Kam On Cheung describes Frontier's role in the project:
Two years ago, when CuisineNet launched, it was an online restaurant guide that only listed restaurants in New York city. Back at that time, we didn't think of content management at all. Part of it was because, with only a few pages to update every week, there was no need to do that. However, CuisineNet quickly grew to a much bigger site that provides dining information for ten cities. In addition, we began to offer more content on our site, and the weekly page update increased from a few pages to almost a hundred pages. Needless to say, we can't possibly handle this workload by updating the site manually.

We decided to use Frontier partly because of its price (or, no price) and mostly because of its flexibility. Other content management tools are either too expensive or too limited for us. The first day I started working on Frontier, I quickly realized that its HTML framework is not enough to handle our site. For example, when I lay our online article out in HTML, I usually spread one article into two or three pages for easy reading. I can put the text of the article into several WP objects, but later, if I want to re-render the text in one single HTML file or if I need to make an index for every article, it will not be easy for me to do so. There were several other similar obstacles that came up when I tried to port our sites into Frontier. My solution is to put all the content into a separate table called "user.web database". Every article or document will have its own "article table" there. Inside that article table is information like the writer's name, release date, document status, creation date, modification date, body copy, sidebar ... When I need to generate the site, I will use a script in the websites table that grabs all necessary data from an article table, and puts it into the rendering table as different directives. After that, it's the job of the normal HTML framework again.

Frontier is so flexible that it can almost do everything you would want for content management. Just give yourself a little bit time to learn it, once you are there, you will never go back.