[Openinteract-help] Launched my site, development process.

[Victor P. <ope...@ha...>]

Hey everybody,

I launched the first phase of the site I've been working on
http://www.nasaproracing.com. It's all done w/ OpenInteract. If you have an
interest, take a look.

Hardware:
VA Linux machine.
Dual PIII 750Mhz
1GB RAM
16GB RAID 1

Software:
OS: FreeBSD 4.4
Web: Apache/1.3.22, mod_perl 1.26, mod_ssl 2.8.5
OpenInteract 1.36
Database: MySQL 3.23.46, with InnoDB tables.

Seems to be running good so far. :-)
I haven't put up the shopping cart yet, still not sure what I want. Also, I
fixed my problem with the dynamic pages getting cached by recompiling apache
with mod_expires and setting the default expiration for text/html docs to 0.
Seems to be working.

Some comments about the dev. process. This has been mentioned before, but I
did find the remove,export,install,apply cycle fairly tedious. I did write a
couple of shell scripts that made my life a lot easier, however, it would
definitely be a good idea to include some more developer-friendly
functionality in oi_manage. I also noticed that there is no nice way to yank
the package out of the root openinteract directory, in order to re-install
it. All it amounts to is taking the entry for your package out of
package_repository.perl and deleting the directory, so I just had my scripts
do it.

The second thing was the security. I kept bumping into it and spending hours
figuring out what is wrong, only to discover that it's an object security
issue. That was primarily because I didn't really understand the structure
at first. So my advice is -- figure out the security scheme before
inheriting from SPOPS::Secure :-).

Third was importing data. I had about 8000 user profile records to import. I
imported everything fine into the DB, however then I had to create entries
for all of them in the sys_security table. Since every user record has to be
"owned" by the individual user, I wrote my own script to go through the user
profile table, and create security entry for each row. This is all well and
good, but it took me an hour to realize that it's a security issue, because
I didn't know that fetch_group() just skips the objects the current user has
no permissions for, without saying much. So I was pulling my hair for a
while.

And of course, I would have shot myself if not for this list and Chris'
amazingly prompt and informative responses. Thank you very much!

-Victor