Symphony.

I am working on a new site, one that has articles that are part of an issue. Say 4 or 5 articles per issue. Also, there will be an opportunity to look at back issues, so say you click on issue 2 then the site reverts to that issue, and all the links/articles on the home page are from that issue.

What is the most elegant way that S2 can do this? Can it be done without awkward section building?

I'm working on a pretty large-scale site for an academic journal, so have thought through some of these issues. What exactly are you looking to accomplish?

To be honest mate, fighting with myself over the best way to do things, and if overly complicated systems are what's required.

Scenario A - Have a magazine style page with all the links to the various articles in that issue. Then if you click say back issue 2, then it goes to domainname.com/backissue/2/ and it looks like the homepage did when that issue was current.

Scenario B - Have no back issue function, and just allow users to look up old articles and read them in an archive style.

Both of those sound like fairly do-able approaches on the front-end. What's taken a lot more thought for me has been the relationships on the back-end. Issues to Articles, Articles to Contributors, Photoessays, Archival Collections, etc. etc.

On the frontend... Scenario A could probably be accomplished by feeding a URL parameter through a page to two DSes: one for the issue itself, one for its constituent pieces.

Scenario B looks like it would function much like a blog.

Well I'm kind of leaning towards a blog-zine. Perhaps that would be the best way to go. A little like Alistapart.com