Re: [Phpslash-devel] Blocks Everywere, Navbar control

[Mike G. <mi...@op...>]

Howdy Joe & Matthew,

On Thu, 2003-10-02 at 07:44, Joe Stewart wrote:
> > > Glad to see Back-End development proceeding.  I've been busy moving our
> > > office.  So hopefully will get cranked back up soon.
> > Giving up your view of the parthenon? :-)
> Yeah, we've got a view of the projects now - but Yazoo Brewing is right down the
> hall. :)   http://www.yazoobrew.com

Well, it may not do much for productivity, but moral will be high!  :)

I thought for a sec that it might have something to do with software
development.  Glad to see that it's a microbrewery..  

[snip]

> > > > I also wanted to know if there was any attempt to extend the ability to
> > > > turn on/off navbar links from the config.ini.php file.  I do think it
> > > > would be useful to allow the more detailed control over what appears in
> > > > the navbar than by simply turning on/off a module.  Certainly for things
> > > > like the links. 
> > > I'd like to see some patches for this, or a web management interface.
> > > I stalled on it with what seemed to be a limitation of the "ini" array
> > > stuff being limited to one level rather than having nested arrays.
> > I once thought that using dotted keywords in the ini file would work
> > almost as well as a nested array.  I still think it does from the
> > installer's standpoint.   You could just put something like
> > navbar.items.login.title = "Login"
> > navbar.items.login.link = "login.php"
> > navbar.items.login.perms = "nobody"

The user setting it up wouldn't much care or be at all concerned that
there were dots in this variable/array.

> That has worked well for some of the stuff in the -dev code.

Neat..  

> > >From a programmer's standpoint, I guess it's worse because you have to
> > do strange searches on the keys of $_PSL, but maybe that could be done
> > once and $_PSL sessionized, as we've been threatening.  
> > OTOH, a web interface is more like what the rest of psl is about. 
> > Probably a lot of the topic bar code could be reused.  The one drawback
> > is that generating the navbar that way would add a database call.  But
> > perhaps it can be sessionized or cached.
> Right.  That's why I kept it in the config file.

I'm often concerned about system resources & load times..  That first
page needs to pop up as quickly as it can..  Would be faster if it
loaded from the file system I think..  But I do like the flexibility of
having this data just stored in the database too.. 

> > Also, I've been toying with the idea of how to best develop a download
> > module (or do I mean file publication module?).  I've got something at
> > my latest PSL install (sorry for the less-than-creative skin)
> > http://www.math.harvard.edu/~leingang/math1b/index.php?section_id=18

We've developed some upload tool for Back-End.  It shouldn't be too hard
to integrate them back into PSL..  Would be nice to see some of the
modules we've been developing migrate back into PSL since they are
developed on a very similar code base.

> > The block of downloads is generated automatically by scouring a given
> > directory.  Dates and document names are generated automatically (either
> > by prettying the filename or parsing LaTeX files), and different formats
> > of the same document are recognized.  There's a config file to override
> > defaults.  To add an item, I install the files and edit the config file
> > if need be.
> Looks nice.

We haven't integrated the multi format tool like you did..  That's a
neat feature.  it also isn't something that we really set up as a
download tool.  Would be very useful to be able to assign a section to a
particular uploaded file so that the files could be grouped together and
each download logged.  

We set it up so that all files in the updir sub-directory can be deleted
through the admin interface.  They can also be uploaded either through
scp or through our upload interface.  It's nice to have that
flexibility.

> > I want to add the ability to upload stuff and make it available for
> > download through a web interface, but I don't want to lose the plain-old
> > scp uploading that I do now.  It seems like it would be good to accept
> > RDF metadata, too, rather than my naive config-file which looks like
> > LDIF. The module should also generate whatever metadata it can on its
> > own, but where does this all get stored?  That, and I would like to
> > assign read/overwrite privileges to certain groups...you can see why all
> > I've been doing is thinking about this.

Having metadata and would be useful..  Even a formal abstract to allow
folks to review a document before they bother to download it.

> > Finally, I'm wondering about ways to expand permissions.  I guess I've
> > been reading too much about Zope, but it seems like there ought be a way
> > to assign permissions to everything, and permissions not set can be
> > acquired.  Like a story can have read permissions set to a certain
> > group, or if it belongs to a section with read permissions set, the
> > story's permission would default to the section's permission.  
> Let's expand on this sometime.  The permissions now can do the second
> story example for sure, and I think the first one too ( maybe with a
> little coaxing.)

The permissions in which version? -dev or 0.7.2?

> > That's what I'm thinking about.  What do you all think?
> good stuff.

ditto..  

> One other thought I've had lately,  what kind of interest is there in the
> option to generate a static site?  Write html files to the drive to be
> published however.

I'd think that it could be quite useful to be able to export it all as
an html file.  Certainly for archiving purposes it is useful.  wget is
great and all, but would be nice to be able to produce a static version.

Could also help to set the home page or even certain articles to be
static if they get slashdotted.  jpcache helps a lot with this, but it
still causes a lot more load than a good old html file.

Btw, what's up with:
	http://www.phpslash.org

I can't see it at all..

Mike
-- 
Mike Gifford, OpenConcept Consulting
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