weblog on the frontpage

kris, November 4, 2002 at 10:28:06 PM CET

actually, i didn't want to implement the weblog on the frontpage feature. i was thinking about improving the static version.

but while thinking of it, i had the following idea: we use a regular weblog, say site.antville.org, which is displayed on the frontpage by using a yet to created macro. i.e. the page www.antville.org looks exactly like site.antville.org. the comments, image, file, stories and skin managers can remain on site.antville.org. i suppose this means there is no need to define all weblog functions for the main site.

comment

hns, November 5, 2002 at 12:12:50 PM CET

Re: weblog on the frontpage

Yep, the weblog should be a regular weblog. I'm not sure if the inclusion should be by macro, however - that would be a very powerful macro, and we'd have to regulate its use heavily to prevent people from weblogs they're not supposed to be including.

Here's what I suggest: The site-wide settings should have a field called "front page weblog" or something like that. If you enter the a valid site alias there, the page list will be included on the front page. The following code would be added to root/main.hac:

  if (root.mainLog) {
    var mainLog = this.get(root.mainLog);
    if (mainLog) {
      mainLog.renderStorylist(); // we shouldn't have to do this!
      res.data.body = mainLog.renderSkinAsString("main");
    }
  }

This currently doesn't work, because formatTimestamp() in global/objectFunctions.js is so braindead that it can't render a date with format "short" or "long" if no site object is in the request path... (That code is mine.) We have to think about a fix for that. Otherwise, this would work well.

The weblog storylist could either appear in the weblog's page layout if we call mainLog.renderSkin("page") (formatTimestamp bug here too, possibly others too - a good chance to clean up the code) or in the root page layout if we keep the root.renderSkin("page").

link

... comment

kris, November 5, 2002 at 5:23:26 PM CET

opinions? anyone?

if you simply mirror the "front page site" on the front page you don't need a skin editor for the root site. you can use the skins of the "front page site" for the other pages of the root site. is this a good thing or not?

in general, i would like to have the front page to consist of a weblog for site news, the list of the recently updated sites and some editable text fragments, but i don't want to see these things on the other pages of the root site. the editable text boxes can be done by an include-a-story-macro but i think we need an optional additional skin for the front page for every weblog. (this comes in handy to display linklists, webcams, weatherpixies etc. on the front page only, but not on other pages.)

link

robert, November 6, 2002 at 12:23:20 AM CET

Re: opinions? anyone?

sorry for the late answer, i'm pretty stressed. reg. "weblog on the frontpage": what i imagine is the possibility pull stories from somewhere inside antville onto the frontpage, to embed either the whole (or limited) frontpage-storylist, the list of stories in a topic or just some selected stories out of a weblog (the latter two should already be possible, although i think the storylist-macro cries for simplification). or even the last n stories of selected weblogs.

now this makes things a lot more complex: it would need a skin-editor for root - which imo is needed anyways, because it's annoying that the root-skins are only editable using ssh.

reg. frontpage-skin: not so sure about that, and the problem is how to make the skin "optional". this goes imo into the direction "custom skins" which i definetly find interesting and worth more than one thought - but which makes things even more complex.

anyway, i think we're going straight into the same "problem" we had so many times before: good ideas beg to be implemented, but this will delay any possible release to "sometime in the future" - and i'm strongly convinced that a release 1.0 of antville is more important now than any new feature - of course that doesn't mean that i don't appreciate any proposals for new features, but i think we really need a feature stop (i'm repeating myself, i know). currently we have a not finished need_for_speed-branch that must be finished and merged back into main branch, and there's still a lot of code-reworking needed.

link

hns, November 6, 2002 at 1:37:00 PM CET

Maybe

I got something wrong, but I think we can implement kris' proposal just by fixing bugs (like the formatTimestamp problem) and adding a few lines of code. I think I'll do some experiment on this later on...

link

robert, November 6, 2002 at 2:53:18 PM CET

could also be

that i'm too skeptic because your proposal sounds really simple ;-)

link

hns, November 6, 2002 at 3:06:05 PM CET

Re: could also be

It is simple! I just tried.

The only bug that prevents us from rendering any site's storylist and/or page template on the frontpage is the bug in renderTimestamp() that "short" and "long" aren't converted into valid date formats. That's really not that hard to fix. Update: I added a bug report for this.
For the skinmanager, we can simply plug the skinmanager from our "main" site into the skinpath whenever there's no other site in the request path. The main site's skinmanager may also contain skins for root, which will be correctly applied. (Currently we don't have entries for root skins in the skin manager, but that would be easy to add for sysadmins).

Both changes are really easy to code. Just a few lines to add. Plus there are added values, for example the skins for the "main" site may be plugged into the skin path also for other sites, i.e. one could change the default skins for an antville installation just by editing the skins of the "main" site.

link

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