face lift

[Stas Bekman <sb...@iil.intel.com>]

Hi, Doug

I have had some thinking and this is my vision of the new site:

I took into account that the site is not homogenious and there is no
unique person to make all the changes (I'm not voluntering for to be one
:). My aim is to make all the things as automatic as possible but still to
have it look nicely. 

I dropped the idea of frames (already talked about) and SSIs since we will
have a problem with new uploads by different folks who will not know how
to update their updated files with SSI, and it's a mess anyway. 

So I've picked the 3rd option the Builder, which will create the site
every time something new comes up. It works like Makefile , so only new
uploads are recompiled to update the pages to be replaced. Now something
new and I think exciting (at least for you :), I'll let to upload the pods
instead of the HTML and let the Builder to make the conversions - less
things to worry about... The Builder will worry to take each pod and
translate it if it wasn't and then having all the files in HTML, the
following will happen: 

Each HTML will be parsed, The header and the tail will be overriden and
the menu will be inserted as the left cell of the table that will be
embedded as well, the content will go to the right cell... The title will
be kept intact. 

The nice thing about menu - it'll be pseudo dynamic, It'll be static since
once online, all the pages will be static - not even javascript, but it'll
look like a dynamic menu, since each page will show a different menu (the
menu will be the same but the expanded submenus will be different) I hope
I explained my idea well... 


We will have the base dirs: 

/src
/site
/bin

All the changes are being uploaded to /src which has internal dir layout
the same as of /site.  (But you can upload foo.pod instead of foo.html). 

Now in /bin we have the Builder. 

So you can have the site updated by user who made the changes with help of
Builder, or to have it in the cron and run all the udpates every 12 hours,
so will be able to forget even about updating the site.... 

The files at /site will be read only, so folks will not forget and updated
the files by mistake, bypassing the Builder. (I guess the dirs will be
readonly as well, I'll make the Builder to make the dirs writable before
the update and turn them R_ONLY after the change. 

In the future we will be able to provide forms for people to submit stuff
and the cgi will use the Builder to update the site... (like success
stories) 

Now the index.html pages in each subdir will have to be updated by hand if
new pods/htmls will be updated, I could make it automatically, but there
is a problem to provide a nice description of each item, one can think of
extracting the info from the <META NAME=description ...> field, but no one
fills these... from POD... which part should be a description... In any
case we can make some of the subdirs automatically indexed including the
description - if no index.html provided... 

So what do you think?


_______________________________________________________________________
Stas Bekman  mailto:sbekman@iil.intel.com    www.singlesheaven.com/stas  
Perl,CGI,Apache,Linux,Web,Java,PC at  www.singlesheaven.com/stas/TULARC
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