Content Management System

Each month I check about 1000 to 1500 labels that collectors send me or that I found in the social media if they are new for our catalog. It would be a hard work not to have all the fast search and sort functions of our catalog to select the 250 to 350 labels that are new. You can not really manage 33,800 labels and 7,600 catalog entries manually. This is no fun. And the results of all the work would be ugly. I have never seen a website with a significant number of pages that look nice at all devices in a non responsive environment. And our aim is not only to show pictures of all known banana labels but also present our collecting area the best way.

You can't compare a small and cheap file based solution and what we have here. But the disadvantages in sence of cost are significant. A professional content management system (CMS) is more expensive. We need a huge 1.3GB database seperated on a second computer (we  have 2 computers for our catalog), maximum main memory and a managed service to monitor all the components. And sometimes I need external help with some IT issues. This days for example I had to pay 238€ extra for a professional Drupal consultant to find the bug with a new PHP version that causes the missing field data.

For me a CMS based technology is the best choice, I would not go with a cheap solution. The only choice from my point of view is this catalog or no catalog. And I know there will never be an equal share of the IT cost. It will end up losing my money. I do know it, because there are only few of us. It is also not possible to define one price that is valid for all collectors in the world. But I would expect that the community of collectors help individually as much as possible. You can do it in participating at the IT cost and / or sending some nice banana labels for my collection.

And in this context: So far I spend too much time infront of the computer to keep everything up to date and to check what could be new. It will help if much more collectors learn how to add labels with best pictures (300dpi, 300×405px) at the right position to reduce my workload. I have added 14,500 labels and most of the other collectors only between 20 and 50 labels. You see - next to the IT cost for the CMS - the second problem where we have to find a solution?

 

Michael

P.S.: Now 6 years ago this environment was small and cheap. I started with this CMS based on the old riehl-collection only with 5€ each month. But this changed when the number of functions, users and labels was increasing. First there was the need to have more main memory (20€ a month) and later to separate the database to a second server and to monitor the application (50+10€ a month). But this trend or lets say stage of expansation was not foreseen.

Who likes to migrate now to a cheaper environment?

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Last modified: 

Mär 2020