Best Practices- Content Structure

Sitecore recommended practices for content structure (information architecture):

• Provide a content structure that closely mimics that of the web site. This allows you to easily build navigational controls, allows you to use security rules to easily deny or grant access to various parts of the content tree, as well as, simplifying the task of finding any given item within the content structure.
• Limit the number of items under any given node that share the same parent, to 100 items or less for performance and usability.
• Limit the number of versions of any item to the fewest possible. Sitecore recommends keeping 10 or fewer versions on any item, but policy may dictate this to be a higher number.
• For business users, such as content authors, turn off Standard Fields to improve performance.
• Avoid using the Rich Text Editor to define structure — this is the job of the presentation layer.
• Use the special syntax to restrict the results on Treelists, DropTrees, and TreelistEx to make sure users can only select the appropriate items, or Sitecore query in the other selection fields.
• Use TreelistEx instead of Treelist when showing very big trees — like the Home node and its descendants — or have lots of Treelist fields in one single item. TreelistEx only computes the tree when you click Edit whereas a Treelist will compute it every time it is rendered.
• Remember the structure of the tree has an impact on URLs by default. If you put items inside a folder, that folder name becomes part of the URL.
• Do not put items that should be accessed by a URL (and have presentation details set) outside of the Home item of the site, as this adds /Sitecore/content to the URL.
• Remember to set Insert Options appropriately to enforce the topology of the tree by restricting the types of items users can create in the different parts of the tree. This can be further restricted through security.
• Insert options can be tailored further through Rules (/sitecore/system/Settings/Rules/Insert Options) This allows you to add/remove insert options according to dynamic conditions (number of existing children), or type of content. This feature is particularly useful when you want to avoid having to create new “Folder templates” to assign the insert options.