Create new table for every Content $type in CakePHP

Question

Description of Goal

Trying to make a CMS (for internal use, but on many sites) with CakePHP.

I'd like to be able to have a generic Content model, then have many different user-generated content types .

This would be simple to do, but my single contents table would eventually become massive if every piece of content on the site was in it. I'd like to split it into tables to help query times/site speed...etc.

My thought (not sure if possible) would be to somehow tell CakePHP that if the type field of the Content is "article", that it should use the content_articles table...etc These tables would be generated afterSave (I suppose) when creating a new content_type .

Would be nice to give them options of which fields the specific content-type would use - even manage this by adding/removing fields...etc, then only generate those fields in the table, and somehow do validation on them based on the content_fields table data.

//my thoughts on tables:    
content_types //id, name, description, use_table
content_fields //id, name, content_type_id, required, field_type, max_chars
content_articles //generated by code
content_people //generated by code

Questions:

Is it even possible? Are there better ways to go about this?

Answer 1

Perhapse use a key value table for content rather than a standard table? The utils plugin from CakeDC can do just that with a supported RDBMS.

Or, you could set this model to use a key value data source like MongoDB, which is a great use case for using NoSQL. I'd probably take that approach if you are talking about massive key value stores and a changing schema. There's a plugin for MongoDb on github.