This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 17:06:21 -0800 From: Nate Campi <nate@campin.net> To: modperl@apache.org Subject: choice of mod_perl technology for news site Lets pretend I work for Wired News, and I really really hate Vignette's content management system. I mean *really* hate it. I'm the Ops guy supporting it and I have nightmares about the next unexplained CMS crash. Ok, we all know mod_perl is the right choice to replace their system, but what is the right way to go when you have a full news staff with many stories going out six days a week, and about a million hits a day? You need all the workflow tools for the news staff, versioning, stories going live at defined times and dates, etc, etc. I don't have the exact requirements, as I'm just trying to collect my thoughts right now, to bring my ideas to the software guys in a couple days. I can get the exact requirements if needed. I like Mason's way of doing things, and it works for salon.com (similar needs), but now that we have AxKit, is that the right way to go? Seems better to force the separation of content and display, and using XML allows the stories to be easily shared for display on affiliated sites. Thoughts? I'm thinking of even donating my mediocre coding skills if they take my advice on this - die Vignette!! I'll do my part to slay the evil beast. Oh, I mean if this wasn't all hypothetical - I wouldn't discuss internal issues like this with the general public ;) -- Nate "Usenet isn't a right. It's a right, a left, and a swift uppercut to the jaw." -Computer Museum (Boston) === Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2002 20:23:31 -0500 To: Nate Campi <nate@campin.net>, modperl@apache.org From: Drew Taylor <drew@drewtaylor.com> Subject: Re: choice of mod_perl technology for news site You should take a look at Bricolage (http://bricolage.thepirtgroup.com/). It's a relatively new, but comprehensive, CMS that is based on Mason & mod_perl. I think it supports most of the things you mentioned below, but you should ask the developers to be sure. If you talk w/ Matt, he'll be sure to hawk AxKit. But then that's Matt. And AxKit really is cool stuff. :-) Drew === From: Robin Berjon <robin@knowscape.com> To: modperl@apache.org Subject: Re: choice of mod_perl technology for news site Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 02:58:00 +0100 On Thursday 07 February 2002 02:06, Nate Campi wrote: > I like Mason's way of doing things, and it works for salon.com (similar > needs), but now that we have AxKit, is that the right way to go? Seems > better to force the separation of content and display, and using XML > allows the stories to be easily shared for display on affiliated sites. > > Thoughts? Die Vignette, die !!!!!! I'm all with you on that one ;-) If you like the Mason way, you might want to check out Bricolage, which has some of the feature you wish for (but not all at this point). I haven't played with it extensively as of now, but it certainly looks nice. If you want AxKit, there are CMSs is being built there. I haven't checked out XIMS in a while, and last time I heard it was running under CGI::XMLApplication / SAWA but considered to be easily portable to AxKit. I don't know where it is now, and how soon it will be publicly available. The other AxKit CMS being built (that I know of) is Tessera. Tessera however has no planned release date. It's a CMS I'm building, and that will happen. But I have no intention to hurry through it as I want to get it right. I have code all over the place, but I don't intend to release anything until I have a working core that I'm happy with. I do believe that /on paper/ I've solved the issues I have with all other CMSs but that still needs to be proven by a fully operational software. And well, I'm "slightly" biased ;-) I plan to have a release by mid-March. That release, however, will not contain any GUI editor, just the core classes. So if you're interested by that CMS, it could be a while before it's there. Depending on what you want there are very nice bricks out there. Barrie Slaymaker has a very good module for workflows (StateML). DAV had its own set of modules which'll deal with a fair part of metadata. Gerald Richter was talking about Perl-enabling mod_dav, which would simply rock. Subversion -- the ultimate replacement for CVS -- is DAV based so that it should be rather easy to extend the current DAV module to support its versioning capabilities. AxKit has pipelines which can make auth and the such pluggable instead of builting as they are altogether too often (always?) built in. It also has Providers and other facilities to grab content from any kind of source. If you have a requirements document (and perhaps a timeline) I'd love to help you, I think I'll write a synthetic paper about Perl CMSs and content management in Perl in general one of these days. === Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 07:01:31 +0000 (GMT) From: Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org> To: Drew Taylor <drew@drewtaylor.com> Subject: Re: choice of mod_perl technology for news site On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Drew Taylor wrote: > You should take a look at Bricolage (http://bricolage.thepirtgroup.com/). > It's a relatively new, but comprehensive, CMS that is based on Mason & > mod_perl. I think it supports most of the things you mentioned below, but > you should ask the developers to be sure. > > If you talk w/ Matt, he'll be sure to hawk AxKit. But then that's Matt. And > AxKit really is cool stuff. :-) Well I'd rather recommend whatever works for people. Bricolage certainly seems full featured, and it looks easy enough to add XSLT support to it, though I haven't had chance to download and try that yet. As far as AxKit based CMS's go, well I was writing one but it died in the dot-bomb as I became an "Anti Spam and Virus Technologist" (which is actually a really nice change from web hacking). As far as other CMS's, Robin has already mentioned XIMS and his Tesserra, but forgot about this one: http://www.callistocms.com/ which simply blew my mind looking at the graphics. I guess I'm easily pleased ;-) I don't know if that one is going to be free or not though. === Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 10:30:19 +0100 (CET) From: Michael Kroell <michael.kroell@uibk.ac.at> To: Robin Berjon <robin@knowscape.com> Subject: Re: choice of mod_perl technology for news site On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Robin Berjon wrote: > If you want AxKit, there are CMSs is being built there. I haven't checked out > XIMS in a while, and last time I heard it was running under > CGI::XMLApplication / SAWA but considered to be easily portable to AxKit. I > don't know where it is now, and how soon it will be publicly available. At the moment, XIMS can be used for basic web-page publishing and for ACL/Role aware information sharing only. Workflows and "traditional" story publishing is still to come and not at the top of our TODO. However, everyone feel free to jump in on that... ;) After we cleaned up the core a bit, XIMS will be released at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xims To see whats there now and for more information, have a look at http://xims.uibk.ac.at/goxims (xgu:xgu) re AxKit CMSs - Christian Jaeger is building something XSP-based for http://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/hauptseite (die, vignette, die! ;) Don't know what's the current status there though. === To: Nate Campi <nate@campin.net> Cc: modperl@apache.org Subject: Re: choice of mod_perl technology for news site From: Dave Hodgkinson <daveh@davehodgkinson.com> Date: 07 Feb 2002 16:05:54 +0000 Nate Campi <nate@campin.net> writes: > Lets pretend I work for Wired News, and I really really hate Vignette's > content management system. I mean *really* hate it. I'm the Ops guy > supporting it and I have nightmares about the next unexplained CMS > crash. > > Ok, we all know mod_perl is the right choice to replace their system, > but what is the right way to go when you have a full news staff with > many stories going out six days a week, and about a million hits a day? My .02c: 1. Draw a REALLY sharp distinction between CMS and publishing the pages. 2. Deliver the bulk of the content from a Template Toolkit, include-driven system. 3. Find a system that does what you need on the content management end, what the pages out to files. 4. Do _not_ try to serve content from a database - keep it simple. 5. Many things you'd think about doing in mod_perl you can probably do in mod_rewrite on the front-end Apache. Um, that's all I can think of for now. === Date: Thu, 7 Feb 2002 17:30:05 -0800 (PST) From: "Ian Kallen <iank@covalent.net>" <iank@covalent.net> To: Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org> Subject: Re: choice of mod_perl technology for news site On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Matt Sergeant wrote: > On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Drew Taylor wrote: > > > You should take a look at Bricolage (http://bricolage.thepirtgroup.com/). > > It's a relatively new, but comprehensive, CMS that is based on Mason & > > mod_perl. I think it supports most of the things you mentioned below, but > > you should ask the developers to be sure. > > > > If you talk w/ Matt, he'll be sure to hawk AxKit. But then that's Matt. And > > AxKit really is cool stuff. :-) > > Well I'd rather recommend whatever works for people. Bricolage certainly > seems full featured, and it looks easy enough to add XSLT support to it, > though I haven't had chance to download and try that yet. > > As far as AxKit based CMS's go, well I was writing one but it died in the > dot-bomb as I became an "Anti Spam and Virus Technologist" (which is > actually a really nice change from web hacking). As far as other CMS's, > Robin has already mentioned XIMS and his Tesserra, but forgot about this > one: http://www.callistocms.com/ which simply blew my mind looking at the > graphics. I guess I'm easily pleased ;-) I don't know if that one is going > to be free or not though. I'm not really involved with the project but it looks to me that bricolage is heading towards content generation abstraction (there's support for Mason and HTML::Template). Therefore, I would imagine that if you wanted to use AxKit as a content generator, you could. === Subject: Re: choice of mod_perl technology for news site From: David Wheeler <david@wheeler.net> To: Ian Kallen "<iank@covalent.net>" <iank@covalent.net> Cc: Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>, Drew Taylor <drew@drewtaylor.com>, Date: 08 Feb 2002 18:52:25 -0800 On Thu, 2002-02-07 at 17:30, Ian Kallen wrote: > > I'm not really involved with the project but it looks to me that bricolage > is heading towards content generation abstraction (there's support for > Mason and HTML::Template). Therefore, I would imagine that if you wanted > to use AxKit as a content generator, you could. Yes, this is true. Bricolage features a pluggable Templating architecture, which means that any templating system could be added. Currently it supports HTML::Mason and HTML::Template. Those who'd like to contribute Template Toolkit and XML/XSLT/AxKit support would be welcomed! Join the Bricolage developers list and join the discussion there if you're interested. https://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=34789 ===