Hierarchical Pages: Storage & Access

[eluser]Teks[/eluser]
I saw that there has been much discussion in these forums about the different strategies and models used for storing hierarchical data in SQL databases. From these discussions, it seemed to me that there are many programmers out there who are unaware of the many different models available - we most often hear about 1 or 2 only, and even then there seems to be sometimes an irrational favouritism towards a specific model over another, regardless of the specific case requirements. This, again, seems to me to indicate a lack of knowledge, and true understanding of the advantages and disadvantages inherent in each model, in each design pattern. I have often found, that in specific situations we have to change, adapt, combine and evolve the 'standard' solutions, in order to get a result that is a *truly* effective answer to our current requirements.

I am in the middle of designing a new CMS, which hopefully will be based on CodeIgniter, and therefore have just gone through the process of researching the current design patterns and trends to help in some of our problems - one of them being, the storage of an arbitrarily large and complex hierarchy of 'pages', which every CMS should be capable of handling. The analysis process itself was quite interesting, and I thought that perhaps someone in the CodeIgniter community might benefit from having access to it. So, here is our final analysis and recommendation, for your critique and enjoyment. I hope someone will find this useful.