Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Outline of 'Getting Started with openACS for Dummies' - guidance/suggestions please!

  • A very dumbed down how-to on using cvs for maintaining your site. I think cvs is pays for itself very quickly, even for beginners. The benefits are: safety net for rolling back to working code, both while developing something and when doing big changes on a site; ability to recover old work that you didn't think you'd need again; makes it possible to upgrade modified sites back to the main code tree. What can we do to lower the bar for people to adopt cvs? More hands-on examples? Have a look at the cvs notes (and here) in the developer tutorial; maybe they can be the basis of the even-simpler version.
  • any suggestions on a client? WinCVS seems to be adequate.
  • A quick guide to doing your dev work on a windows machine via ssh. Cygwin perhaps? There's no real difference between using a windows desktop and a linux desktop for OpenACS development. In both cases, you have a shell (putty or cygwin/ssh or a commercial product) for emacs, another shell for tailing the log, a web browser pointing at the work in progress, a web browser pointing to the admin pages, and a web browser for api-doc. Anybody using Eclipse?
  • It looks like passwords can be set with single user additions but not in batches? Is there a scenario where you would want to set passwords in bulk uploads? When would you have a list of email/name/password? If you didn't have password, would you want to manually create a bunch? (It wouldn't be hard to add bulk password upload, though, and it would be a good project for another neophyte; after all, I added bulk user import and it took a few hours and I'm no developer).
  • Adding users to qmail Why do you want to add users to qmail?
  • Quick step by step guide for installing modules, enabling them and mapping them to url's on the site With 4.6.3, this is pretty easy - Go to /acs-admin/apm/packages-install, Enable whatever you want, and follow the instructions to auto-mount it (oops, seems broken on my site. bah). Sounds like we need a link from the Congratulations screen.
  • Ideally, the doc for each module should contain all the sample sql and whatnot needed to put samplings on the index page Instead of sql, I think each package should provide an includeable template that is dynamic and has a visible action (a link or a button), like lars-blogger does. For example, my home page has adp code like this:
    <include src="/packages/lars-blogger/www/blog" url="/blog" max_content_length="350" max_num_items="4">
    and
    <include src="/packages/ja-boxscore/www/score" limit="9" url="/boxscore/">
    
  • And the big one - customizing the index page to show bits and pieces of available modules. Do we have a repository of examples that could be shown like Joel's or Lars' home pages. Clearly the default Congratulations page isn't helping people. People don't read or want to read it, and apparently would rather have a page that's the starting point for customization. Suggestions on what that page would look like? My home page is an HTML table in .adp with includes for the main packages I want to highlight. Lars, how did you code yours? Other opinions?
  • I've never used docBook - is there a wysiwyg interface for it?Not as such. But emacs works well, and if you put a bit of effort into docbook you are quickly rewarded by all of the html autogeneration it does, especially when you change things and don't have to go make a bunch of fixes. Try the Docbook walkthrough - using the pre-built xml files and Makefile as a working starting point to modify, you should get results in 10 minutes.