# Suitable design for "magazine" portal?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suitable-design-for-magazine-portal/87834>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 6, 2007, 9:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suitable-design-for-magazine-portal/87834 "2007-03-06T09:58:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![David\_Johansson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/9fc348/32.png) [@David\_Johansson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/David_Johansson)\
**Post date:** [March 6, 2007, 9:58am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/suitable-design-for-magazine-portal/87834/1 "2007-03-06T09:58:09Z")

</div>

I am designing a portal for a “digital magazine” within travel, and  
would like to ask for advice on the design.

With digital magazine, I mean a portal with lots of editorial content  
and commentary on a variety of topics, e.g. arranged in sections for  
each continent, special topics like airlines, hotels etc. I would like  
to serve these articles from the database, probably caching them on  
the way, very similar to how e.g. Mephisto Blog is constructed. REST-  
ful URLs seem nice, e.g.

[http://site.com/category/subcategory/articleID-articlename](http://site.com/category/subcategory/articleID-articlename)

That I could have accomplished with Mephisto, more or less. But  
certain pages on the magazine portal will be special. For example, in  
one category I may wish to put up “classified ads” listings from a  
special database, on another an interactive map, etc.

So how would you design a site where certain articles would be  
straight markup, and others requiring a special controller, while  
maintaining a homogenous page structure and letting me edit and  
rearrange articles dynamically?

I was thinking of making a Page object, which includes standard things  
like page name, title, category / subcategory and then a field  
indicating which controller should handle the page, e.g. an “article”  
controller for standard pages, a “classified ads” controller for  
others and so forth. Page objects are then used to generate dynamic  
menus, and requests to construct a specific page forwarded to the  
assigned controller.

Does it make sense, or does anyone have another solution to share?  
Perhaps I am missing an obvious Railsy way to solve this? I’d be  
really grateful for help.