For the last few weeks, I've been working on my work web site, ~Sterling to improve it's capabilities. The purpose of this update is many-fold. Read on if you want to learn about my software (you may want to read this post first)...
My web site is based upon the "Knowledge Base" software I developed for the CIS Support Site. This has made keeping this web site up-to-date considerably easier. The software started as a handy index generator that generates indexes of pages posted into the system automatically. Additionally, it's able to perform some basic transformations on input files to generate HTML or RSS or whatever. It's a very minimal content manager that mostly relies upon the features of Mason for most of its functionality.
Okay, so I branched the system to create ~Sterling, which was the repository for the CIS 450 web site last year. I added some more features to make it automatically detect multiple file formats with the same basename minus suffix (e.g., Session-01.pdf, Session-01.pdf, Session-01.key.zip). This made it possible to view multiple versions of a file and using the transformation bits, I was able to generate HTML summaries straight from my Keynote presentations since the format is based around an XML file.
Problems: (1) I now have two versions of the "knowledge base" software that I wanted to have the same features. (2) Adding content always requires dumping files into the system, which is overkill for items like blog/news entries, blog aggregation, etc. (3) One bad file spoiled the whole web site—any index page that found a badly formatted Mason file caused the index to puke. (4) The transformation system was a kludge and required careful tweaking and depended dubiously on file suffixes.
Thus, I endeavored to rewrite the software and have now decided that it is satisfactory for my content management dreams of the past several years. It's not quite ready for distribution as I need to add a little bit more documentation, but I anticipate that in the next month or so, I'll be updating the woeful Contentment project page.
I should be able to take the existing CIS Knowledge Base and drop it into the new system with very little effort. My ~Sterling page is going to be repopulated over the next couple weeks with the original files, but using the new improved transformation system. I still need to migrate the indexing system from the old knowledge base to the new one, but that should be a relatively simple matter (and this time, errors will be handled gracefully!)
The new transformation system is really the key. I borrowed a lot of ideas from Cocoon since I've always kind of liked that system. Basically, each file in the system is first checked to see what input "kind" it has (determined by a set of Mason plugin components, which pick the "kind" from file suffix, file contents, etc.). Based on this information, the file is run through a "generator," which translates the file into an initial kind. The system only has two generators right now: Mason (runs the file as a Mason component) and the fallback generator which just reads the file as is.
Then, the transformation system is applied to each input file. The transformation system attempts to find a sequence of transformations that can be applied to the file to get it from it's initial kind to the requested final kind (which is determined by more plugin Mason components, usually based upon the URL or query parameters). If no transformation can be found, then you'll get a 404, otherwise, it attempts to find the best transformation using a shortest path search (which is probably too costly, but works fine for now with a very small number of transformers). The transformers are applied to get the final output file.
Yet, we're not done yet. Finally, based upon the final output kind, another group of components are applied to the output, called "filters," which further modify the file. The main reason for this is that HTML files coming through the system need to have some links fixed, etc. before output. I had intially thought that this would be a good place to put the theme engine too, but I've decided against for now until I can come up with a decent policy for regulating how themes should work. I have a theming engine in place now, but it depends upon the "autohandler" feature of Mason, in the same way as the previous version of the knowledge base.
Once all the filters have been applied, the file is finally output (after being passed through any autohandlers, as per normal Mason operation).
I should have the system adapted to take any index and turn it into a proper RSS feed and I also want to add Atom feeds this time round as well (and better put in the "alternate" links to let browsers know it's there).
The next step is to add in the database features so that the web site can store some content into MySQL. This will make a lot of the routine updates to the site much easier. A file manager would also be handy to allow users to upload and manage files through a web browser, which is another goal of mine.
If all goes well, I may be dropping Drupal for Contentment in a couple months. I won't hold my breath though...
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