12 Sep 2000 jmason   » (Master)

Joined FoRK, so now I'm thoroughly snowed ;)

WebMake now has a significant chunk of CMS magic included, in that it can handle metadata and use this to order and query content chunks, in order to generate indices and sitemaps. And better, the dependency checking works with it, so unchanged files do not even need to be read to get their metadata, it's cached in a per-site db file.

BTW the big win of WebMake's dependency support is that it means that WebMake is a CMS which works with web caches nicely. Wes Felter's HtP site brought this point up on the radar last month with a pointer to Resin's caching system.

Anyway, 0.4, just released, does this nicely, and even has some doco ;)

It's getting to the stage where it's satisfied the functionality I needed it to have, so I'll probably be slowing down soon and letting it accumulate some bugfixes and get stable.

One thing first, though: the CVS code now can generate a sitemap using only 3 types of data:

  • an "up" metadatum, pointing to the content item that is "up" from the current node

  • a "root" attribute on a content item, indicating that it's the root of the content tree

  • a pair of content templates which will be filled out with the details of each node, to generate the list

This is a beaut. It means that an RSS site summary file, or even a Slashdot-style "front page", can be generated entirely using a <sitemap> tag. Well, nearly -- I still need to write support for the visibility time range metadata types...

Other thing on the TODO list: allow WebMake to get content from an external command, and write up a doco on how WebMake can be used from within mod_perl to act as a conventional, dynamic-server-pages style system.

Hmm.... wonder what the wiki tag does? BTW still need a project tag ;)

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