[webdev] Re: RSS

[Tom Hull <thull2@xxxxxxx>]

James Violette wrote:
> 
> These are the things on neuralmatrix that I did not immediately find on 
> OpenACS...
> 
> Is there an OpenACS counterpart for:
>  - photo gallery support?

Yes. I'm not sure where the doc for it is, but under openacs/www/photodb/
there is a lot of stuff. Not surprising, considering that this code was
initially written for http://photo.net/.

>  - book reviews?

Not really, but PostNuke's Reviews module doesn't have anything specific
to do with books -- that's just some configuration boilerplate. Reviews
in PostNuke are just stories with a little icing for rating and ranking.

There are also 3rd party PostNuke modules for things like managing links
to amazon.com, but I doubt that they are tied into the Reviews module.
(I could be wrong.)

I've always expected to write a separate module for book reviews. I have
some book review data/programs on my website that I expect to rewrite
one of these days. The database should work in both places, even though
the language bindings will be different.

Also, looking at photo.net there are reviews all over the site. For
instance, digital cameras:

   http://www.photo.net/digital/cameras/

In the long run we won't want to have just one set of reviews.

>  - site stats?

I don't know of anything. The aolserver access stat files are supposed
to be apache-compatible, so we should be able to use one of the many
CGI-based packages for displaying those stats.

The other stats-thing that postnuke does is to keep track of how many
times pages are served. While that's moderately interesting, it very
likely huts database performance, whereas http access logs capture
much the same data much more efficiently.

>  - search engine?

OpenACS has some built-in search capability which depends on having the
pltcl language installed. This fails on aclug.notwerk.net do to symbol
incomptabilities, but I have it working locally and have tested it in
some cases (e.g., searching classified ad text). It shouldn't be too
hard to get compatible (or missing) parts installed.

A second approach would be to use a search index tool such as htdig,
which crawls through the site to build its index. My thinking is that
we should try both, see how they work.

>  - is there a way to post notices on the main site?

We have news and calendar. We could define a newsgroup specifically
for homepage notices, and pull the data out there. Easy. Or we could
do synopses of the most recent 10-20 news items like postnuke. We
need to talk about homepage layout, workspace layout, etc., as well
as content organization. Like many things, this is easier to figure
out how to do it than it is to figure out what to do.

> I think the user experience is more polished in the OpenACS application 
> then in PostNuke.
> OpenACS seems speedier.  I know that OpenACS is running on a p166.  What 
> is PostNuke running on?

Don't know about the machine, but I think Dale's DSL connection is slower
than John's, so that may be part of it. OTOH, I have postnuke running on
a local machine here and it feels much slower than another website I have
running, also using php/mysql. The difference is probably the complexity
of the php code (object-oriented strikes again); I'm told that a php
accelerator (something that caches compiled php) helps.

-- 
/*
  *  Tom Hull * thull2 at cox.net * http://www.tomhull.com/
  */