Tuomas; I wish I was Finnish so I could be a Tuomas instead of a Thomas. On Sun, May 27, 2001 at 11:29:58AM +0300, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote: > On 25 May 2001 23:58:43 -0400, Tom Rathborne wrote: > > think about it for a bit and let me know if there's anyone you know > > who has time to do any technical/design/content _and_ make sure > > that nothing is dropped on the floor. > Now, I could be interested in the design front, since I somehow > think the only way to make this new site happen is to take some > responsibility on it, and make it happen together instead of just. > Just discussing it wont make it happen, no matter how good opinions > are voiced :-) I agree entirely - but I'm just doing _my_ technical stuff and it's not worth much unless other people are doing the other bits in concert. > Tom: To avoid the original problem with the current site, does your > perl thingy have good docs so people can learn it and maybe try it > out on their machines to get an idea how it works, in case it needs > to be expanded or developed further in the future and for some > reason you dont have the possibility to do it? The docs are a bit sketchy at the moment, but I _have_ been able to install it myself in under an hour now so it's obviously not intractably hairy. I will be documenting it for my article so you can expect some fairly thorough docs by the end of July at the _very_ latest. > I like the content separation in it, but I am worried a bit about > this side. Me too. That's why I'm not pushing _too_ hard to use it. I want everyone to be aware as they put their head through the noose ... erm nevermind. > Not that PHP is the Holy Grail in this, no way. More likely the Ugly > Bowl of Spaghetti unless someone coordinates it as well. But it is > easier to find people who can cook more spaghetti of course.. I am > not really sure. I would vote for the PHP if there was someone to > look after the code. Right - so it's a matter of can we find _someone_ to take care of the tends-to-get-messy PHP code, or is Tom going to stick around to take care of his neater-but-obtuse Perl stuff? A nasty dilemma to be sure. > In that sense Tom's perl thing looks more easy to work with, but > we'd need docs - and it will be harder to expand should we need to > add some new functionality, unless Tom is around to do it. And this > was what we wanted to avoid in the first place. Docs will be on the way but folks may want to make a decision before the docs are in a state to inspire confidence. It's pretty easy to add a new handler type to my stuff. The handlers just get a page object (which is how you output stuff), a filehandle (which is reading from the current file), and $%args (which is a bunch of settings). You just have to interpret the stuff in the file a certain polite way, and output stuff through the page object in a certain way. There are a lot of black boxes that keep things simple; for example the entire Yahoo-style links-from-database viewing handler is less than 90 lines of code (with a bunch of blank lines but few comments). Needless to say the devil is in the details -- but I try to keep the details in one place and not all over the document tree. Cheers, Tom -- -- Tom Rathborne tomr@xxxxxxxxxxxx -- http://www.aceldama.com/~tomr/ -- "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style."
