I am a beginner trying to learn how to turn a WordPress site into a digital archive. I will need to create permalinks for potentially tens of thousands of documents in this archive. I’m hoping someone here could help me come up with a feasible plan so that I’ll know what I need to study to pull this off.
Currently, I have two strategies in mind:
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Using the WordPress commandline app, I could create a page/post for every single document in the archive. I’m not sure how to do this yet, but I think I could use Apache Solr to build in an advanced search function. I’m hoping with sufficient metadata, having this many discrete pages will still be navigable. But I am worried that having this many pages or posts will be unmanageable on both the admin and user side.
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Or, I create a single display page in combination with a database of XML metadata files. Using xquery/xpath, the user could query the documents they need and the metadata and object would show up on the display page. I’m not sure how to create permalinks with this strategy yet, though, or if it’s even possible.
Are either of these strategies reasonable? Or is there a better strategy I haven’t thought of? Any advice would be much appreciated. And please forgive my lack of fluency with programmer lingo. I hope my explanation above is clear.