Static vs. Dynamic

Never underestimate how much work an engineer will put into being lazy.

by Trevor, 08/01/2018 11:09 AM EDT

My next grand adventure has been the setup of photo albums on this site, and I've run into the decision of whether I should just generate pages for everything or have the CMS handle finding image files and filling in albums every time they're loaded. Of course, I wouldn't generate static pages manually. I've already written a Python script to do that for me.

In favor of just making static pages:

Photo albums don't really change once they're made, so why make the dynamic engine work harder every time it loads?
I've already written a script to handle this, and it can redo everything if I fix something and want to rerun it.
PicoCMS doesn't support providing info about images or subgroups natively. I'd have to go find and learn a plugin.
You'll be able to look at pretty pictures sooner since I already know how to do things this way.

In favor of seeking a dynamic solution:

It makes creating albums less hassle, reducing the number of steps to set them up. And I plan to continue creating new albums.
After I've created more than a few photo albums, the effort to redo all of them if I decide to change something is much less.
It's not like this is a high traffic site. The loss of efficiency isn't going to be noticeable. Don't benchmark this site.
I have ambitions of creating themes for others to use with PicoCMS some day, and setting things up correctly now will make that easier.

So I guess the argument is about more than just ease of use in the future. It's also about saving time now or later. I've already decided it makes more sense for me to work towards a dynamic solution. This is one of the things though that makes it looks like I'm not making any progress on this site when in actuality a lot is happening behind the scenes. Maybe that's why I leave test items littered all about: so it feels like I'm actually doing something.

TTFN