Database Schema

Because of CMS is universal product allowing to manage any database, it requires few common rules for database schema to be complied. This logic corresponded to best practices in database design and helps developers to create effective applications. Here are the requirements to database schema:

Each table must have 2 required fields:

• Identity field: integer, which is set as primary key. Identity seed and increments are optional;
• Descriptor field - varchar or nvarchar field that represents each record in CMS user interface. Descriptor becomes a link to a record in lists or "trees" and title of the page when record is selected for browsing or editing. Descriptor field values also appear in "breadcrumbs" to help navigate the CMS workspace.

If two tables have many-to-many relation, their identity fields must be named different. For example if each website section can have one or many related news articles and each news article can link to one or many website section, table representing the section needs to contain identity field named sections_id, thus news table will contain news_id field accordingly.

Current version of SiteMech CMS supports following MS SQL Server 2000 data types:

bigint bit binary char datetime decimal float image int money nchar

ntext nvarchar numeric real smalldatetime smallint smallmoney text tinyint varbinary varchar

Folowing data types are NOT supported in current versions:

• sql_variant
• sysname
• timestamp
• uniqueidentifier (GUID)

 SiteMech CMS supports all MySQL data types.

Network

CMS and managed websites must be on the same hosting server. Network mapped disks are not supported in current versions. However SQL Server may be installed on remote machine, there just should be available through TCP/IP network.