[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       forrest-dev
Subject:    Re: [RT] Writing generated page to disk in "forrest run"
From:       Ross Gardler <rgardler () apache ! org>
Date:       2005-12-30 23:52:09
Message-ID: 43B5C829.6060100 () apache ! org
[Download RAW message or body]

David Crossley wrote:
> Ross Gardler wrote:
> 
>>Comments?
> 
> 
> The idea is fanstastic.

I'm doing some experimentation with it now. Initial experiments are 
encouraging.

I've decided to go with Ferdinands suggestion of a ForrestBar extension, 
mainly because we could move it into a user ForrestBar with other 
helpful stuff on their (search the FAQ, search the docs, open a Jira 
issue etc.)

Also, it is not possible to do my original iframe idea without  skin 
edits. Therefore it is more suitable for use in the Dispatcher where we 
don't have to mess with core stuff. We can create contracts at a later 
stage.

Finally, I've been thinking of adding a "content developer" run mode and 
a "content reader" run mode recently. The difference would be things 
like the logging detail, profiling etc. would be turned on in developer. 
Since this has much wider implications I thought I'd leave it for 
another time.

> I do have one concern. First some background.
> 
> See the new FAQ:
> http://forrest.apache.org/docs/faq.html#crawler
> 
> The user (not knowing exactly how Forrest works)
> had changed the only link, to point to an offsite
> page instead. Therefore the local document stopped
> being processed by the 'forrest site' command, yet
> looked fine in 'forrest run' mode. Calamity.

In this case the page would be saved in the build/site directory when 
the user viewed it to check their edits. So when they did svn up, all 
would be well (yes, I skipped the step of getting from build/site to the 
svn checkout, we'll come back to that when initial experiments are in 
place).

> So my concern is that users will forget to link
> the new document into the system. Perhaps we can
> automatically add a default link (perhaps to a
> supplementary site.xml) and issue a warning to
> the console.

This is a slightly different case. If I understand the case here the 
user has created a new page using their chosen editor and gone to it 
directly by typing http://localhost:8888/myNewPage.html, but has not 
added a link to it from a page or a menu.

In this case the page will still end up in the final local build (the 
previewed and saved it), it will therefore end up on the live server (as 
  in the previous use case).

The lack of a link is a very clear user error and could not be claimed 
to be unexpected behaviour. I don't think we need to worry ourselves 
about it.

Having said that, we could provide a tool to search the known document 
tree and tell us what pages link to the current page. Not sure how 
useful this would be (sounds more like a CMS feature than a publisher 
feature to me).

Ross
[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]