[Tutor] [opinions?] Web development... (kind of long) [ACS?]

[Danny Yoo]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2001, Rob Andrews wrote:

> I'm looking at a lot of the same issues as I work toward automating
> Useless Python. There are a number of solutions, as you've already
> noticed, and any of them will require deciphering, setup, and
> maintenance.

[ some text cut ]

> We had no idea back at the start of the year that Useless Python would
> see so much activity. It appears now that what this site needs most
> right now is for the people who contribute content to the site to be
> able to post and update material without having to wait for me to get
> around to doing it manually (and to see thier page hit statistics). It
> would also be great to give people options on how to browse the content,
> along the lines of search-engine-styel queries maybe. I still haven't
> decided exactly how to get around all the details of everything without
> a security nightmare.


Phil Greenspun has an online book about this which I'm enjoying a lot
called "Phil and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing":

    http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/

The author is very opinionated, and this gives the book a quirky
personality.  More importantly, the book contains valuable "war stories"
on building these sorts of web sites --- he talks about database
management, privacy, and tips on where to tread carefully.  Nice pictures
too.

Perhaps most useful is his ACS toolkit that does a lot of the heavy lifing
in collaborative web sites.  Although its current incarnation is in Java,
some people split off and formed the "OpenACS":

    http://openacs.org

which is in Tcl.  Fortunately, there are Python bindings:

    http://pywx.idyll.org/


I don't know if it's worth the effort to use the software, but it might be
useful to glean some of its ideas.  Hope this helps!