Forum OpenACS Development: Does OpenACS 4.x match 3.x in static content features?

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1: Does OpenACS 4.x match 3.x in static content features?
Posted by Matthew Braithwaite on 08/15/01 02:24 AM

I'm having trouble figuring out how to do some basic static content tricks in OpenACS 4.0, and I'm not sure if it's because the features I want don't exist, or just because I'm not looking in the right place.

What I want:

  • Ability to keep track of what users have read what pages (in ACS 3.x, user_content_map). There is a comment that acs_rels could be used for this, but I can't find evidence that it is.
  • Ability to record into the database all requests for pages on my site from external Referers; ability to see the top referers for each page and site-wide (in ACS 3.x, referer_log).
  • Ability to grovel through pages checking for broken links, as in ACS 3.x. The documentation for the static pages module says that this is ``better addressed with a more general tool'', but doesn't say what that tool might be.
  • Ability to record into the database all requests for nonexistent pages that have non-empty Referer: headers (that is, detection of when I break a link). I don't know if this was in ACS 3.x.

Can anybody help my dumb ass? If the answer is that I need to write some of the above, that's fine, but I can't even figure out if that's the case!

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2: Response to Does OpenACS 4.x match 3.x in static content features? (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 08/15/01 06:00 AM
You've run into the immaturity of the ACS code base we've inherited, I do believe.  Remember that the (ACS Classic) community responded to the first 4.0 release with disgust that such an incomplete piece of work would be labelled "product quality software".

It would be great if folks like you were to start hammering on OACS 4 ferreting out basic missing functionality of this sort.  Those of us porting have been rewriting some chunks of the core and other packages but mostly that's centered around removing Oracle dependencies, regularizing content management, support for multiple sitewide search technologies, and (well) the fundamental work needed for multi-db support in the first place.

Feature enhancement has been on the back burner.  Clearly this will change once we get our first dual-db releases solid and stable.

And, yeah, if you want to write stuff like this let's get a discussion going here so folks can chime in
with ideas as to what they'd like to see.