Antville Project

Brainstorming: Antville as a Desktop CMS

This may sound (or even be) far off, but has anybody ever thought about using antville as desktop CMS and publishing system? The thought came to me because I'm using Antville offline, as a great text & image storage & retrieval system.

While looking for an off-site solution for websites without much server functionality, I thought how nice it would be to just push a button & publish one of those antville "sites" via ftp as static pages.

That would save so much work that I'd even be willing to program it myself (not sure if I'm still able to, but... worth a try)

So, if you think this would be a good idea, help me do some brainstorming (and if you think it would be a baaad idea, just tell me why!)

I'll post my first ideas in the comments to avoid getting too longish here.

comment    

 
Chronistin, April 9, 2003 at 12:31:49 AM CEST

What we would need

  • Changing the output to static html (not too tricky except for defining an adequate structure - maybe similar to Radio Userland?)

  • FTP functionality (this has been done in the helma universe, maybe there are even modules that could be used?)

  • a switch to determine if an antville-installation should use this functionality

what else?

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tobi, April 9, 2003 at 11:49:47 AM CEST

from my experience with another project i just can say that static html output is trickier than i expected (hint: you have neither a request nor a path object).

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Chronistin, April 9, 2003 at 10:15:23 PM CEST

yeah, i know. still it has been done & it can be done...

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nex, April 10, 2003 at 11:09:44 AM CEST

nothing tricky about static html

i'm doing that all the time. just spidering the blog with wget or something of that ilk, with apropriate parameters, is all you need to do. for a full text search in the static pages, you have to grep of course, and you can't do anything that requires pushing a button, but all other links work perfectly, i.e. you can browse the stories by topic, calender, amd blog.

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hns, April 10, 2003 at 11:14:03 AM CEST

That's something different alltogether

It's not the functionality we're talking about here. We're talking about push-button remote publishing, not running wget after each update and ftp-ing the result to some remote server.

Still, just out of curiosity, what parameters do you use for wget to get a full browsable archive?

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nex, April 14, 2003 at 7:55:31 PM CEST

somewhat different, yes

Regarding the parameters: I did that for a particular project, where I used Antville to keep a project log. I left my backup copy of that project, err, somewhere, I'll look that up as soon as I have it back and post it here. But it wasn't very sophisticated, it grabbed, for example, the edit page for every story. It was basically a standard recursive spider starting at the front page that converted 'internal' links to point to the local copy.

You're right, if you want to do it after each update, it's a different story. What I proposed could be done at the push of a button, but of course it would be inefficient to re-run the whole process for every update. And the primitive version I actually used is far from perfect, too.

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... comment
 
Chronistin, April 9, 2003 at 12:33:03 AM CEST

What we would lose

  • Community functions, unfortunately.
  • search functionality

anything else?

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hns, April 9, 2003 at 12:42:17 PM CEST

oops, just saw your comment now. As I said below, I think the right approach would be to start from zero with a new group of "remote skins" rather than leaving away stuff from the existing "local" ones.

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... comment
 
hns, April 9, 2003 at 12:14:48 PM CEST

Would definitely be cool

but you don't know how hard it is until you try. I'm sure about one thing: we'd have to cut back a lot of functionality such as comments, login etc. That means the "remote templates" would probably be easier to build from the ground up than trying to start from the existing ones.

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Chronistin, April 9, 2003 at 10:17:42 PM CEST

You are definitely right

I do not intend to change the existing functions, just add the functionality to publish static sites via ftp.

I'm going to give it a try next week.

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nex, April 10, 2003 at 11:13:12 AM CEST

from scratch?

actually, the functionality of static pages is almost identical to what a user who isn't logged in gets. when i spider a blog for archival purposes, i make sure it's at public (taking it offline if there's anything secret in it) and that the spider isn't logged in. to make that perfect, you'd just have to leave away the search feature and the log-in link and ... what else?

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Chronistin, April 14, 2003 at 1:28:58 PM CEST

nex, the idea is to do this with inside functionality instead of using 2 outside programs to achieve it.

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nex, April 14, 2003 at 7:44:32 PM CEST

i see

I hope (suppose, actually) you don't mean that you're generally afraid of using external tools and are willing to waste time and effort on implementing functionality that already exists a second time for the xenophobic sake of avoiding "outside programs".

Of course, you could surely find functionality that would have to be newly created because it could not be achieved with with existing wget-like tools. I guess you want to extend Antville so you at least have buttons in apropriate places for the FTP publishing. If you want to make your tool available to other users, it would probably also be a good idea not to rely on external tools that not everyone has. But if all you want to do is put a static copy of your site on-line, all you actually have to create is a skin set that looks okay with it (i.e. no 'comment' links etc.).

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