Chico Digital Web Tool / News: Recent posts

If you're interested in working with this code base, I'd definitely be willing to put this in a public CVS here. Let me know. Three big projects I can think of: 1) mod_perl enabled 2) SQL backend 3) javascript front-end (click to edit DHTML). Or whatever, I'm totally open to suggestions...

I've re-released the current 1.02 version of Web Tool as open source (again).

I'm also very interested in working with other programmers on this project. Email me.

My initial test platform using mod_perl was my Windows machine using IndigoPerl and it worked fine. I tested under mod_perl on a Linux/Apache platform yesterday and there are problems. It looks like the Windows apache server doesn't spawn child processes, and so shared memory is always consistent. In unix, apache spawns children and the server requests are handled by different children, each with it's own (inconsistent) copy of the Perl database hash. ... read more

There were some problems with the 0.82 installation script, this new revision fixes all known issues. If this doesn't install easily on a Unix/Linux/BSD platform, please let me know.

Because of past problems, I strongly recommend that anyone who plans to download and use Web Tool to add themselves to the project update mailing list. I can then inform you of updates, patches and fixes.

This is a bug-fix release, it addresses some relatively minor bugs.

Bug Fixes (since 0.81):

1) More page name checking.
2) Auto-linked text does not cause line breaks.
3) Auto-linked text does not match text inside tags.
4) FLOCK_ENABLE now part of config file.
5) Push '.' onto @INC, since modules are in cgi-bin.
6) Edit screen aligns correctly in Microsoft IE
7) Two more user template samples included.... read more

Chico Digital Web Tool is a lightweight web content management system (CMS) that doesn't need a database. Users add new pages and links via their web browser. New web pages are then generated based on HTML templates. Check out our Demo!

Users of the online demo found a bug in the code, and it's sort of embarassing, just because it's so obvious. If you hit 'Create Page' and don't enter a page name, it seems to silently ignore you. But actually, an empty string entry is added to the database, and when you 'End Session' this crashes the static HTML generation code... Ouch! Very easy to fix, it's just funny that I tested 0.80 so thoroughly, but OF COURSE you have to type in a name when you create a new page, or so I was thinking...

The major goal of this release was to simplify the installation.
It also fixes a few bugs, adds a few features and cleans up the code
internals. Please, PLEASE, please... if you download and install
this, please give me feedback or bug reports.

Bug Fixes:

1) Link names allow only characters, numbers and spaces.
2) Hard references removed from template pages.
3) Only writes static HTML pages that are new, modified, or missing.
4) Delete Page function now deletes the static HTML file.
5) Links are presented in the order they are entered on the page.... read more

I'm going to work on wrapping up the documentation and doing more testing,
I plan to release it in about a week. The demo will soon be the pre-release
version under test, so if it's not working, I'm probably working on it live. As
a test case, I think I'll regenerate my web site using Web Tool... what a
concept.

Two really cool things about this new release: the installation is now pretty
much automated, with a browser based config menu the first time you run
the script. The major new feature is that templates can be selected from
a pull-down menu (and immediately previewed). All the admin has to do is
stick template files into the correct directory and they appear in the pulldown
list.

Play with the demo at http://chicodigital.com/demo.html to see what it's all about.

Version 0.51 fixes a single bug, and seems to have no major problems. There are a couple hard links in the Template HTML files that need to be hand-edited when you install it.

Please report any bugs! either here at Source Forge or directly to support@chicodigital.com. I can' fix it if I don't know about it...

This reflects a snapshot of the current working demo on the chicodigital site:

http://chicodigital.com/cgi-bin/demo/webtool.cgi

(the login name is 'demo' and the password is 'demo')

This now integrates a real-time HTML preview function into the page editor.

Very interested in any comments or feedback: support@chicodigital.com

Check out the running demo at http://chicodigital.com/cgi-bin/demo/webtool.cgi. The name is 'demo'' and the password is 'demo'.

I squashed a list of bugs the past few days, and added much functionality that was on my 'todo' list. The code tarball here no longer reflects the demo running on the chicodigital.com site, but I will update both next week for an 'official' 0.5 alpha. The biggest change is that the interface does HTML previews and edits in the same window (I had it going to a second window, but that seemed like a pain clicking back and forth).

Just created a snapshot of the working demo code on my web server, and I'm calling it
alpha 0.4. Both .tgz files are the same. This package has not been tested at all. I will
do that soon... You need to edit WebTool/variables.pm with your web servers
file and directory path info.

Plenty of info on the web site, but I have not officially released 0.5 yet.
You can also see a working demo and the source code on the web site.
Mostly just need to clean up the code, finalize the docs, and make sure
my install package will work. There are still many unimplemented features,
but check out the demo, it'll give you a good idea of what it's about.