[Nms-cgi-devel] nms::formmail

[Dave C. <da...@da...>]

First attempt at sending this bounced back. Please ensure that you copy
Erik in on any response.

Dave...

----- Forwarded message from Dave Cross <da...@da...> -----

Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 10:59:30 +0000
From: Dave Cross <da...@da...>
To: Erik Assum <er...@as...>
Cc: nms...@li...
Subject: Re: nms::formmail

On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 11:09:44AM +0100, Erik Assum (er...@as...) wrote:
> 
> Hi Dave!
> 
> Just read your article on www.perl.com, and had a very quick look at
> formmail.pl

Erik,

Thanks for the comments. I've copied my reply to the nms developers' list
as that seems to be the appropriate place to have these discussions. You
might like to consider joining the mailing list and continuing the
discussion there - <http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/nms-cgi-devel>
 
> Here are a couple of first impressions:
> 
> * since the thingies are cgi-scripts, why not call them *.cgi

Naming of CGI scripts is either a huge issue or a non-issue depending on
how you look at it. Personally, I like to have no extension and put all the
scripts in /cgi-bin. I don't like the idea of .pl as it tells the blackhats
that you're running Perl on your server and that's too much information IMO.

But one of the rules of nms is that we don't change unnecessary parts of
Matt's interface. Therefore we use Matt's names for the scripts.

> * use Net::SMTP instead of /usr/lib/sendmail, no need to reinvent the
>   wheel :)

Sorry, we've had this discussion. Another fundemental rule of nms is that
we don't use CPAN modules as our target audience would be driven away if
we made installation too complex. I think I mention this in the article.

> * use Texttools in combination with __DATA__ for the html. I believe
>   there exists a module which lets you have several different __DATA__
>   tags, so you can have __ERROR__ as well.

I like this idea. We can't use Inline::Files (because of the no modules
rule) but we could write our own simple templating system and store the
templates in __DATA__. I've already started doing something like that with
wwwadmin.pl (part of wwwboard).
 
> * use some configuration module, so that the novice doesn't even have
>   to dig into the perl-code

Again, this comes down to using Matt's interface. We have been discussing
ways to make installation easier. Maybe a CGI script that can configure the
other programs. You input on this would be most welcome.
> 
> If you think these are  oke ideas, I'm sure I can do some of the work
> on formmail.pl

Any help you can give would be much appreciated. Please sign up to 
sourceforge and I'll add you to the list of developers on nms.

Dave...

-- 

  "Don't you boys know any _nice_ songs?"

----- End forwarded message -----

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