Re: [site-engine-dev] The story so far...

[MJ Ray]

I am very pleased to say that as of last night, the site-engine code
is largely complete.  It's complete enough for tsw to use, anyway, I
think.  I'll go online in a few minutes and upload the code so you can
all take a look at it.  The database tables and our templates will
have to wait a day or two for a while for me to finish tidying them up
and put them in the right places to be uploaded, but there should be
enough code on there tonight to give you an idea of what it can do.
When we actually launch our site later this week, you can take a look
at that to see it in action.

It's a very simple application at present.  There's under 1300 lines
of code in the entire system.  Some of it isn't very pretty code yet
and there are some noticeable gaps (eg session management, RSS feeds
and the advert server module that was postponed), but it does work
well enough to run a site.  Speed is also quite poor at the moment,
but we're hoping to work around that for now with some clever
webserver tuning (which might actually be the right way to do it
anyway).  Any help on correcting any of these problems will be gladly
welcomed.

Finally, a quick tour.  The basic system is in a number of bits:

1. There are back-end modules which try to make the content modules'
jobs easier by handling the "grunt work" of talking to the database,
nntp/news server and the webserver via CGI.  The CGI module also
handles templating, but I'm not entirely sure about whether that's the
right place for it.  Probably is.

2. There are content modules which all provide some basic methods
(show, list, submit!, choose!) for interacting with them and might
provide extra functions (eg user module also offers valid?, priv?,
remind! and set-priv!).

3. There is the "glue code" which actually creates the web site that
users see by combining the content modules in different ways and using
the CGI module to communicate it to a waiting world.  The glue code in
CVS is the stuff I've written for tsw, but if you change this layer,
you could have a completely different web site.  This accounts for
about half of the current system's code, though, so replacing it is no
small task.

4. There are the templates, which are used by the glue code as
parameters to the CGI module for formatting the output from the site,
headers and all.  I particularly like our "boom screen" which the
exception handler calls.  I've been seeing too much of it lately.

5. There are a few helper scripts for particular tasks.  From memory,
one sends an account request to our server admins and one cancels
messages on the nntp server. There should also be one to send out
password reminders.  These will hit CVS after I've tested them.

Right, that's that.  If you take a look and it all seems too daunting,
look again in a couple of days after I add more comments,
documentation and auxiliary files.  If you understand it now, then I'm
here waiting for your code ;-)

The project web site is at
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/site-engine ... please report any
bugs into the bug tracker there.

-- 
MJR                                                   Thesis watch: 27%
      This is my personal web site =-> http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
         http://www.alug.org.uk/ <-- This is the LUG I go to
I work for this clever internet developer ==> http://www.luminas.co.uk/