OpenACS Fans,
I stumbled across OpenACS about a year ago. At the time I tried it out under FreeBSD under VMware. To make a long story less long my FreeBSD VM eventually got sacraficed due to disk space limitations. I forget which Linux distro I was running at the time but I didn't have any luck installing OpenACS on it. Anyway, fastforward a year and I'm now running FreeBSD on my home PC, and decided to give OpenACS another look.
When I tried it a year ago I went through the tutorial but didn't really dig into the other available documentation like I should have. I'm doing so now and am discovering there is a lot of documentation available, though some of it does take a little digging/searching to find all the useful info. I know I'm kinda old fashioned, but I personally prefer printable documentation, even if viewing on screen. I really prefer PDF documentation, but at the very least a "view all on one page" option would be helpful. Searching through the forums I came across a few older posts mentioning that at one time PDF documentation was available. One post had a link to a rough draft of some PDF docs for verion 5.2. Is anyone currently working on PDF documentation? If not I will probably at the very least attempt transoform some of the available docs into PDFs for my personal use. If I manage to do a good enough job and others would also find it useful I'd certainly be happy to share.
Okay, on to the tutorial:
When I went through the tutorial a year ago I hit a couple of problems. First, the drop script failed. I posted to the forum and Jim Lynch replied with:
The error indicates the problem is our fault... we -still- haven't fixed our content_type__drop_type() call... I keep thinking we did; this is at least a 4-year old problem. I'll be back here to provide a fix you can apply to your installation.
Well, I'm back a year later and the 4-year old problem, which would be a 5-year old problem now, still appears to exist.
Second, I got an error with trying to add a note:
Required switch -item_id not provided
A search of the forum would indicate this problem has also been around for a while. I even found a bug report concerning the problem that dates from 2004.
Should someone perhaps consider updating the tutorial?
I'd personally find the tutorial more helpful if, in addition to it being bug free, it explained some of the code it presents. It would also be nice if it gave a slightly more complex example. It would be nice if it showed some examples of using content_type__create_attribute, and maybe perhaps some simple examples of one-to-one, one-to-many, and/or many-to-may relations. For example, I've seen tutorials for some web frameworks that use a book model as an example for the tutorial with books having a publisher and one or more authors.
