You could organize your articles in folders based on creation date, common in news papers and blogs that have a large amount of content coming in (/Articles/2008/5/My_new_article). Or maybe just per year if you dont have too much content. This is performance-wise one of the better alternatives, you can handle large amounts of contents over time without worrying about the tree or URLs. The downside is maybe how you show these pages on your templates if you don't want your visitors to see this date structure.
Another alternative is to write an extension to EPiServer that handles article URLs in the way you want, for example by checking the article archive for missing articles.
Thats what I can think of right now, maybe there are more alternatives..
We publish all our new articles in a folder "Articles".
Over time the number of articles get quite many. This slows down the backend i terms of finding articles and add new ones. (the tree list are quite long)
A solution to this that has been discussed is to create a new folder "Archive" into which we move articles older than a specified time range. The problem with this is that the original path/url to the article isn't remapped in this transaction.
What is the most effective way to handle this problem and to not lose the path/url to the articles. Is there any other more effective way of building up the article structure in the backend?
Thanks in advance.