Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS web site

1: OpenACS web site

Posted by Lars Pind on 02/11/02 10:36 AM

In celebration of the <a href="http://www.pinds.com/lars/goodbye-
arsdigita">death of ArsDigita</a> (http://www.pinds.com/lars/goodbye-
arsdigita), I'm going to be a bit more active over here at OpenACS.

The first thing I did, of course, was to re-enable my bboard alerts.
The next thing I did was notice that the bboard-alert-human-
interface-enhancement I did about 18 months ago in ACS 3.x still
haven't made their way to OpenACS.

It's mainly:

<ul>

<li>Saying who the poster is (so you don't have to hit "Reply" and
decipher an email address

<li>Handling HTML tags more intelligently, by actually including the
URL of a link, and saying *foo* and _bar_ for bold and underline ...
things like that.

</ul>

My question is: How long is it -- realistically -- going to be until
OpenACS.org is ported to oaks-whatever-4?

If it's a couple months or more, I'd be
happy to spend a couple hours porting over my fixes to whatever's
sitting behind openacs now.

2: Response to OpenACS web site (response to 1)

Posted by Lars Pind on 02/11/02 10:42 AM

Hah, this just reminded me of another fix: I'd let you change the HTML/plaintext flag of a post after you'd posted it.

The original code (running on openacs.org) doesn't allow you to change that. Instead the formatting code does a quick check to see if there are any tags in a plaintext-formatted post, and if so, ignores the plaintext setting and formats it as an HTML posting anyway.

This has the unintended consequence that if you post something where you *do* want it to be plaintext, because you need to quote a bunch of HTML code that you want displayed verbatim, well, you can't. You have to do the &lt;foo&gt; thing.

3: Response to OpenACS web site (response to 1)

Posted by Neophytos Demetriou on 02/11/02 01:53 PM

Lars welcome back! As you might know already we have ported acs-workflow-4.3 [1] and everybody is impressed with your work -- check the #openacs chatlogs:

<ul>
<li>"workflow is the example to follow for documentation"
<li>"acs-workflow is the best package we inherited from aD"
</ul>

You'll notice that many packages are refactored to use worklows (e.g. etp). Anyway, I have something if you are interested which is both related to workflows and integration of services. I'll email you by the end of the week.

[1] <a href=http://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0003Iq&topic_id=OpenACS%204%2e0%20Design&topic=12
>http://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0003Iq&topic_id=OpenACS%204%2e0%20Design&topic=12</a>

4: Response to OpenACS web site (response to 1)

Posted by Michael Feldstein on 02/11/02 04:03 PM

Lars, I know I speak for many here when I say we'd love to have
your active involvement on shaping up the UI in general. I, for
one, was very frustrated when we weren't able to use the great UI
work you did for ACS Java.

5: Response to OpenACS web site (response to 1)

Posted by Ben Adida on 02/11/02 04:23 PM

We have some great contributions from MuseaTech to bring
OpenACS.org to v4.x, but it's probably going to take a bit more
time to really move all of OpenACS.org to it (mostly because of
other modules like SDM, ticket-tracker...).

As they say, the shoemaker's children go barefoot... we spend
so much time building OpenACS the toolkit that OpenACS.org
doesn't get enough attention. So we're *MORE* than happy to get
any contribution, specifically your UI contributions.

In fact, the suggestion you mention has been on my task list for
way too long. I'm psyched to have you as part of the OpenACS
community, and I'd love to have you integrate this functionality
into the OpenACS 3.x tree. Let's get you an account over on
SourceForge (where 3.x is hosted), and work from there!

6: Response to OpenACS web site (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 02/11/02 06:43 PM

Lars, let me add my voice to this little love-fest thread. Another thing you might do that's been on my todo list is to drop in your tag-closing proc to the current bboard code. Our mighty Stud Hackers here can't seem to remember to close tags in HTML posts, myself included.

I would love to get the ball rolling on the OpenACS 4 version of the website. That got shelved until I could solve some significant performance problems with OpenACS 4/PostgreSQL. I've fixed those problems for the most part but in the interim everyone got busy with rent-paying work and the new site project was placed on hold for now.

I'd sure like to get it rolling again, though ...

7: Response to OpenACS web site (response to 1)

Posted by Lars Pind on 02/11/02 07:37 PM

All of the improvements I made, including the tag-closing stuff, should be in Oaksfour.

So the issue is still whether I should invest time in a dead-ended site, or if we could better spend the time porting openacs.org to version 4.

8: Response to OpenACS web site (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 02/11/02 08:44 PM

Hey, I guess you've given away your vote in the poll ...

Right, all that stuff is in O[pen]ACS 4. Not all packages use the tag-closing code but I've dropped it in as I've noticed. It's one of the many little things that should be attacked systematically in our next development round.

As far as how to spend time ... what will it take to get the ball rolling on our site migration? I'm not asking Lars but everyone. We've got the documentation project rolling again so it is possible to imagine a release in the near term, are there people available to work on the O[pen]ACS 4-based site afterwards?

9: Response to OpenACS web site (response to 1)

Posted by Talli Somekh on 02/12/02 04:50 AM

Lars, I think your question about whether working on improving this site or the new site is a good one. There are many more 3.x sites out there that could probably take advantage of your improvements. However, there never seems to be a clear upgrade path from 3.2.x to 3.2.(x+1).

The new site does have a laundry list (http://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0003T9&topic_id=OpenACS&topic=11) of items that need to be worked on. However, I don't think any are as important as migrating the bboard data. Once that were finished, I would think the site could launch. Is that true?

talli

10: Response to OpenACS web site (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 02/12/02 06:31 AM

Migrating the bboard data has been largely solved by your folks and Tilmann (though I never followed up to test his work, I just more or less trust him, and think that's a pretty good idea all-around).

SDM is the big deal after that, i.e. our running a parallel instance until a group of folk get together to recreate a 4x SDM. Woe is us, we're all damned busy with contract work and as been said more or less, the shoemaker's son goes shoeless.

SDM, integrated with the download package and a better than ACS 4 ticket tracker (I still like new-ticket) and then we have all the code we need for a pure-OpenACS 4 openacs.org.

11: Response to OpenACS web site (response to 1)

Posted by Talli Somekh on 02/13/02 07:31 PM

Don, having a pure OACS4 OpenACS.org would be cool, but is that the launch criteria? Is having the bboard data migrated enough to launch?

Talli