[RT] Dynamic Content in Forrest

[Tim Williams <wi...@gmail.com>]

I'm wondering how folks handle dynamic content within their Forrest
sites.  While most folks are probably publishing fairly static, user
independent content, I wonder how folks are handling the dynamic
stuff.  I would imagine there are many folks with 90% of their conent
being xml-based that works well with Forrest, but how do you handle
the other 10%?

Based on what I've read on the history of Forrest, perhaps it was
never intended to solve these problems but I've got to believe that
there are many sites that have a 90/10 ratio of static to dynamic
content?

Specifically, I'm wondering about the following use-cases (there are
others but these are exemplars for discussion:

1)  Permissions.  Do you just use standard web server functionality to
handle permissions?  What happens when you web site scales and you
need credentials independent of the server? Has anyone accounted for
that?

2) Sessions.  Clearly related to the above, what's the approach for a
"session" in Forrest?  There was a discussion recently on Cocoon-users
(i think) that asked what if I simply want to change the site header
depending on who the user is?

3) Discussion Forum/Bulletin Board.  Say I've got a site that's 95%
content but I want to have a simple discussion forum, how do i
integrate it?  I've noticed one of the example sites uses IFrames but
that doesn't seem like a very clean solution to me.

This is obviously just a simple list but the point is that if Forrest
meets 90% of peoples publishing requirements and it can't meet the
other 10%, where does it leave us?  Maybe the answer is just "forrest
isn't for you", but I have to say 90 is a high percent.

I guess the database plugin answers the question when the *content* is
dynamic, so the question is really when we want to integrate simple
applications into Forrest.  Anyway, I throw that out there... 
thoughts?

Thanks,
--tim

Re: [RT] Dynamic Content in Forrest

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

David Crossley wrote:

> The main thing is that the default configuration for
> Forrest needs to be static. For example, Google search
> is the default.
> 
> This is another case for having multiple "seed" sites.

See my commit in around 20 minitues :-)

>>In the past Forrest would probably have resisted these ideas. However, 
>>now we have plugins users/devs can easily create these kinds of 
>>applications without having to fork Forrest. The question is whether 
>>Forrest wants to host these kinds of plugins since they will not work in 
>>a static environment. We'll worry about that later though, they can 
>>always be hosted elsewhere.
> 
> 
> I don't see any reason not to keep such plugins at
> forrest.apache.org

Cool :-)

Ross

Re: [RT] Dynamic Content in Forrest

[David Crossley <cr...@apache.org>]

Ross Gardler wrote:
> Tim Williams wrote:
> >I'm wondering how folks handle dynamic content within their Forrest
> >sites.  
> 
> Forrest has a stated goal to provide static representations of sites 
> where possible.

We have always said that Forrest is intended to be
either static or dynamic. See the current Introduction
on the home page.

> However, some of us do use it in dynamic environments 
> and now we have plugins we can afford to relax things a little with 
> respect to dynamic sites.
> 
> Having said that, Forrest does not resist dynamic content, it just likes 
> to see a static alternative wherever possible. For example, Lucene 
> searches can be replaced by a Google search box.

The main thing is that the default configuration for
Forrest needs to be static. For example, Google search
is the default.

This is another case for having multiple "seed" sites.

> In the past Forrest would probably have resisted these ideas. However, 
> now we have plugins users/devs can easily create these kinds of 
> applications without having to fork Forrest. The question is whether 
> Forrest wants to host these kinds of plugins since they will not work in 
> a static environment. We'll worry about that later though, they can 
> always be hosted elsewhere.

I don't see any reason not to keep such plugins at
forrest.apache.org

David

Re: [RT] Dynamic Content in Forrest

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

Tim Williams wrote:
> I'm wondering how folks handle dynamic content within their Forrest
> sites.  

Forrest has a stated goal to provide static representations of sites 
where possible. However, some of us do use it in dynamic environments 
and now we have plugins we can afford to relax things a little with 
respect to dynamic sites.

Having said that, Forrest does not resist dynamic content, it just likes 
to see a static alternative wherever possible. For example, Lucene 
searches can be replaced by a Google search box.

> Specifically, I'm wondering about the following use-cases (there are
> others but these are exemplars for discussion:

Before answering specific use cases let me first say that since Forrest 
is built on Cocoon you will usually find that the solution for all use 
cases are in the Cocoon framework somewhere.

> 1)  Permissions.  Do you just use standard web server functionality to
> handle permissions?  What happens when you web site scales and you
> need credentials independent of the server? Has anyone accounted for
> that?

See the authorisation block in Cocoon

> 2) Sessions.  Clearly related to the above, what's the approach for a
> "session" in Forrest?  There was a discussion recently on Cocoon-users
> (i think) that asked what if I simply want to change the site header
> depending on who the user is?

There are many of ways of working with sessions in Cocoon. The easiest, 
but least flexible is to use the {request:*} parameters in the sitemap. 
There is also a request generator that allows you to aggregate the 
request parameters with the source document. For full flexibility you 
should really think about installing the Flow block from Cocoon.

> 3) Discussion Forum/Bulletin Board.  Say I've got a site that's 95%
> content but I want to have a simple discussion forum, how do i
> integrate it?  I've noticed one of the example sites uses IFrames but
> that doesn't seem like a very clean solution to me.

Choose the bulletin board software you like and use the HTML generator 
to get the relevant content from the forum software and embed it within 
a Forrest site like any other source file.

> I guess the database plugin answers the question when the *content* is
> dynamic, so the question is really when we want to integrate simple
> applications into Forrest.  Anyway, I throw that out there... 
> thoughts?

Plugins are your friend :-)

In the past Forrest would probably have resisted these ideas. However, 
now we have plugins users/devs can easily create these kinds of 
applications without having to fork Forrest. The question is whether 
Forrest wants to host these kinds of plugins since they will not work in 
a static environment. We'll worry about that later though, they can 
always be hosted elsewhere.

Ross

Re: [RT] Dynamic Content in Forrest

[Diwaker Gupta <di...@apache.org>]

Personally, I don't think of Forrest as the panacea of web publishing. IMHO 
Forrest does one thing (well, more than one!), and does it well. I don't want 
Forrest to do everything for me, because there are better solutions out 
there. More comments inline.

On Friday 22 July 2005 6:51 pm, Tim Williams wrote:
> I'm wondering how folks handle dynamic content within their Forrest
> sites.  While most folks are probably publishing fairly static, user
> independent content, I wonder how folks are handling the dynamic
> stuff.  I would imagine there are many folks with 90% of their conent
> being xml-based that works well with Forrest, but how do you handle
> the other 10%?

I guess a lot depends on *what* this dynamic content is. I run a blog and a 
photo gallery and use dedicated toosl for those (Wordpress, Gallery2)

> 1)  Permissions.  Do you just use standard web server functionality to
> handle permissions?  What happens when you web site scales and you
> need credentials independent of the server? Has anyone accounted for
> that?

Like I mentioned before, I'd rather choose a tool that was meant for serving 
dynamic content rather than try to get Forrest to do it (its good for 
hacking, but perhaps not for production). All good forum/blog/CMS/gallery 
tools come with multi user support, fine grained access control etc.

> 3) Discussion Forum/Bulletin Board.  Say I've got a site that's 95%
> content but I want to have a simple discussion forum, how do i
> integrate it?  I've noticed one of the example sites uses IFrames but
> that doesn't seem like a very clean solution to me.

This is a good example of why I think Forrest is an overkill for such 
applications. I mean why would anyone want to write a forum post in 
OpenOffice.org or DocBook, or want to have forum posts output as text/PDF. 
What forums *do* need however is a good database backend, indexing, 
authentication, messaging and so forth.

> This is obviously just a simple list but the point is that if Forrest
> meets 90% of peoples publishing requirements and it can't meet the
> other 10%, where does it leave us?  Maybe the answer is just "forrest
> isn't for you", but I have to say 90 is a high percent.

I'm not sure I agree. Forrest meets 100% of my demands as far as static 
content goes. But static content is maybe like 30% of what I publish. I know 
its possible to run forrest in 'run' mode, but how many live Forrest websites 
actually do that?

But thats just me :-)

Diwaker
-- 
Web/Blog/Gallery: http://floatingsun.net