Re: Suggestion for the News site

["Duane Richards" <duane extrawebs com>]

I'm currently working on a project to use php to allow my content updaters
to dump into a predefined xml document which is then pulled back in by php
when the page is read. This allows me to parse for dates, subjects and who
updated the document among other things. I don't see why we couldn't use a
system similar to this.

Duane Richards
duane extrawebs com
www.extrawebs.com

----- Original Message -----
From: Tomas V.V.Cox <cox idecnet com>
To: Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>
Cc: Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>; <gnome-web-list gnome org>;
<gnome-hackers gnome org>
Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2001 1:28 PM
Subject: Re: Suggestion for the News site


> Joakim Ziegler wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 08:21:29PM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> >
> > >> With all due respect, Miguel, you seem to not quite know what you're
talking
> > >> about here. I've been seeing what people want to do with the GNOME
site for
> > >> over a year now, and I might have some better idea of this.
> >
> > > Well, as I stated in my mail I might not know what are the solutions,
> > > but I would get the idea that content management would be based around
> > > keeping information in a representation-independent location and have
> > > this mapped into HTML at some point.
> >
> > Ok. Your alternatives for this are basically either some sort of XML
> > representation, or a database. Neither will allow you to do
> > "representation-independent" content, since you'll have to store some
level
> > of HTML-like formatting in the database or XML (unless your XML is very
> > high-level, like DocBook, but I *really* don't think we want to do that
sort
> > of thing). Not to say that specific parts of the content, like the
newsitems
> > on Gnotices, should be flat HTML files or HTML files with some
templates, but
> > that'll always be specific to each application and subsection of the
site.
> > I've used many of, and looked at about all web content management
systems
> > in existence, at least the free ones, over a span of about 8 years, and
let
> > me tell you, there's no system that does what you want in a general
fashion.
>
> Perhaps there is no system but we could make one :). The main idea is to
> store the content in one file, and make one extra file for each
> representation system you want.
> For example in PHP could be:
> The index.php file (if you points your browser (or PDA, etc) to
> http://gnome.org/devel/index.php?output=htm&lang=es), calls another file
> who have the content and knows how to translate it. Pieces of content
> are dumped to string variables. Next the index.php, replaces the tags in
> the selected template (the kind of output you want) with these variables
> and outputs the result back to the browser.
> You always have the same tags (that represents content pieces), the only
> thing you need to transform the output in different ways is to place
> these tags in different ways in different templates.
>
> If we enhance the idea, we could easy make nice things. For example:
> * we can do an "url library", so if you want to make a link to a page or
> piece of information, you only need to link to the correct entry in the
> library.
> * an "edit this page" system, so people can easy edit contents.
> * a "track this page" system, so if the page changes people could be
> notified.
> * and many others like "print this page" or "send this page to a
> friend".
>
> If you can read some php code, here is the basic idea:
>
> index.php (the url you want to see)
> ------------------------------------
> <?php
> // Selects the correct template, from the $output var in HTTP_GET_VARS
> if ($output == 'htm'){
> $tamplate = 'index.htm';
> }
> $tpl = new Template ($template, $output);
> // Cache system
> if ($tpl->is_cached()){
> $tpl->send_cached_page();
> exit;
> }
> // Executes index.msgs
> include ('./index.msgs');
> // Assign template tags to vars from index.msgs
> // a template tag could be something like {TITLE} inside the template
> $tpl->assign(array(
> TITLE => $title,
> BODY => $body)
> );
> // We can do a render system, so if the output is other than html,
> // translates msgs to it. For example: <a href="url.htm">here</a>
> // should become: "here: url.htm" if the output selected is plain text.
> $tpl->render_msgs();
> // Replace all the template tags with its messages
> $tpl->parse ();
> $tpl->send_to_browser();
> ?>
>
> index.msgs (storage content and process tranlations)
> This file is data for .po files
> ----------------------------------------------------
> <?php
> // reads the $lang var from HTTP_GET_VARS
> putenv ("LANG=$lang");
> bindtextdomain ("myPHPApp", "./locale");
> textdomain ("myPHPApp");
> // translate messages
> $title = gettext ("This is the title");
> // messages are in some kind of restricted html language, so the
> // render can easy transform it to another formats
> $body = gettext ("This is the long body <a href=\"./more.php\">here
> more</a>".
> "but the this <b>body</b> is very important");
> ?>
>
> index.htm (the html template)
> -----------------------------
> <html>
> <title>{TITLE}</title>
> <body>
> {BODY}
> </body>
> </html>
>
> index.txt (the plain text template)
> ------------------------------------
> Title: {TITLE}
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> {BODY}
>
>
> Tomas V.V.Cox
>
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