Forum OpenACS Q&A: Getting current News items on Home Page!

Good Afternoon,

I've searched the message base and finding nothing or what I did find was difficult for my to understand, here is my issue:

I am trying to display the article titles from my news page in a table cell on my index.html page. I understand this can be done via a .tcl or .adp page, but nowhere can I find exactly what is required when constructing an .adp or .tcl page.

If anyone has accomplished this, could you send or provide your code. I think after this one, I'll be able to figure out how to embed further functionality throughout my site.

Thanks,

Thanks Stan, I figured I'd be doing this anyway, just wanted to see if there was a possibility of getting a jump start 😊 . I'll probably print out all the index pages and start looking for the common components.

Thanks again...

Gilbert, James Shannon created a module called "Chunks" that I believe is in the latest versions of OpenACS. It does exactly what you want. You can see it in action at www.sv2s.com.

Scott

Chunks looks exactly like what I want, I guess my problem with the incorporation of dynamic data with HTML is I'm really a "newbie" when it comes to the use of TCL and the entire ACS system. While I am proficient with the use of php and HTML, the ACS way is different. I'm used to the HTML being in plain sight with the php embedded into the basic HTML page. The .tcl page looks completely different, in fact it looks like a large TCL script with a little HTML embedded into it.

It's hard to follow the index.tcl page from the Intranet module because of the interaction with all the extra files in many different modules; some of which are not in the document root.

There is a significant, non-trivial learning curve in using ACS Classic and OpenACS. That's the way it is. There are certainly other alternatives (Zope, PHP, ColdFusion, Vignette, Slashcode, whatever). You will probably not be building photo.nets in your first week.

When I get back to work I'm going to print out all the pages in the OpenACS 3.2.5 distro and see what I can learn.

That's a lot of pages and Classic ACS/OpenACS are heavily dependent on things like preloaded Tcl procs, etc. If you choose to take this avenue, don't forget to print out all of the SQL that builds all the PostgreSQL tables. The data model is very important.

I don't know how you've decided how you are going to read all those pages. At least with the ACS Classic, documentation has ranged wildly from terse "Look at the source code" to the ACS version of War and Peace. I started diddling with the ACS in late 1998 and I can't imagine trying to print out Classic ACS's source + docs and trying to read it linearly. But that's just me. (I have no idea if OpenACS is markedly easier to read.)

You might be better off carefully studying relatively simple modules (I dunno: news, press, maybe faq).

ArsDigita used to have 3-week bootcamps with 3-5 problem sets. Depending on your learning style, you might be better off doing the psets first before tackling your own custom module, especially since you admitted to being an ACS/OpenACS/Tcl newbie. If you haven't read it, http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda is still relevant. Buy Brent Welch's Tcl/Tk book; the first few chapters of the Tcl stuff should give you a good start.

I mentioned intranet/index.tcl because it's actually a good starting point. Make a backup copy (cp index.tcl index-orig.tcl) and hack down the page until it only has two dynamically generated elements. By dumbing down the page to this level, the code should be relatively easy to read. The ACS is so replete with code of different complexity and different quality (both in code and documentation), it's probably one of the best places from which to start.

Good luck.

Here is an example of a page I am working on. I am no Tcl wizard, yet I managed to cobble together some code from other pages. Sort of Cave-man style but it works. Notice the ns_write "" Gilbert, which will will do just that and write everything between the quotes it to the document. You can use it to add HTML to the page in between(or around) the tcl code. By looking at the code and at the web page, you can see how I constructed it. The ad_header adds the beginning HTML tags. The ad_footer closes the HTML page. You'll see some tags which account for some missing HTML. I created these as an easy way to add HTML code I use a lot. Like a poor man's template. For more on how those work look HERE

One warning, the code will probably be available, but the web page may go down. Its being served by DSL and my provider went out of business (AGAIN!)

Here is the web page Page

Here is the code for the page in a text fileCode

Thanks Matthew and Sean,

The examples of your site are great for getting me started, by seeing the TCL source and comparing with the saved html, I've already got a better idea about what I need to do, looks like I'm going to have to get more imaginative in my visualization of the page as I develope the .tcl code. Thank's again for the examples, btw the site looks good!

Sean, thanks for the correction, I've read Philip's comments about those who don't use his name correctly, I definately don't want to get on his bad side.

I'll check out those other examples you mentioned. I'll get started on the psets this weekend (should be a couple of months worth of work, with my schedule).

Don't worry, I'm committed to OpenACS, the overall system offers so much value, and all it costs is a little time to learn a few more skills that add value to me and ultimately will allow me to add to the OpenACS community at large.

Thanks all, I'm off to bed...

You might be interested in my short introduction to how a tcl page is contructed. http://www.thedesignexperience.org/openacs/

Gilbert, sorry I should have posted the code up before. Here's what I have on that home page for News:

[reiterate_through_chunk $db news "< a href="/news/item.tcl?scope=public&news_item_id=$news_item_id">$title
< br>$pretty_release_date< br>$body (< a href="/news/item.tcl?scope=public&news_item_id=$news_item_id">Read more)
< br>< br clear=all>"]

Here's Events (Calendar):

[reiterate_through_chunk $db calendar "< a href="/calendar/item.tcl?scope=public&calendar_id=$calendar_id">$title
< br>$pretty_start_date (< a href="$calendar_link">Get More Info)
< br>< br>"]

Forums (bboard):

[reiterate_through_chunk $db threads "< a href="$msg_link">$one_line
< br>  $count recent messages in
< br>  $topic


"]

and Classifieds (GC):

[reiterate_through_chunk $db recent_classifieds "< a href="$classified_ad_link">$one_line
< br>< br>"]

Note, get rid of the spaces after the "<" signs in the anchor tags and line breaks.

As you can see I'm using the heck out of Chunks. Although, it seems to not be updating everything like it should throughout the day. Sometimes I need to restart the server. If anyone fixes that, let me know!

Thanks,
Scott

Sean, Dave, Roger, Scott, and Jerry,

Profuse thanks, (Sean) your tips about coding are going to be a big help, I've got all this php/MySQL stuff floating around, and I see I'm going to have to get better at coding HTML by hand, Dreamweaver doesn't do TCL/ADP 😊...

(Dave) You page is going to be a great help, thanks for pointing it out to me, I realized I already had your site bookmarked from another post you had made, but I didn't realize you had this page. Guess it pays to browse an entire site rather than just the home and one other page. Thanks again...

(Roger) Thanks for the info, I'll grab the AOLServer docs and read up on ADP's. Food for thought, and definately another skill to add to my bag...Thanks...

(Scott) Thanks for the code, seeing how you've implemented chunks and now with the code it's starting to make sense. I found the html file that explains chunks but seeing it actually used really makes a difference. Thanks...

(Jerry) Thanks for the clarification, while you weren't replying to me directly, nontheless it will help me also. By the way, I really like your site, the muted background images really make it special and gives it that professional touch.

All, thanks for your help, I'll be diving into all the suggestions and when I've got something to show in a few weeks I'll post it here and maybe you'll have the time to give me a little feedback...

Thanks,

I suspect it's the extraneous equal signs that are causing your problems.

Hi Guys,

I have almost the same problem with Gilbert.  Although a little
different.  I am now using OpenACS 4.x for this site.

Same issue on the home page.  My issue is that a copy of 2 instances
of a news
modules must be displayed on the home page.

I have 2 news instances that is mounted on /press and another on
/articles.  The home page will have a snap shot of both.  In OpenACS4
rather than making 2 tcl or adp file.  I just used the templating
system.  Basically the news modules use the master template that i
created.  My master template is smart enought to apply the look based
on the URL.  It still uses the skin module but slightly modified.

Anyway what is the best way to do a copy to 2 separate news package
instance?  I would like to do this the OpenACS 4.x way rather than
making a tcl file that gets the data from the db.  There are portlets
right?  Is this the best way?  I want to uses existing OpenACS 4.x
services/features as much as possible.  Thanks.

Jun

This cutting and pasting is really tedious in Linux: here I go again,
my news and bboard chunks scripts look like this:

News:

<pre><%= [reiterate_through_chunk $db news "< a
href=""$news_link">$title< /a> ($pretty_release_date) - $title<
br>
"] %></pre>

Board:

<pre><%= [reiterate_through_chunk acs threads "< a
href=""$msg_id">$one_line< /a>< br>$count recent messages
in<br>$category< br>
"] %></pre>

My errors are:

<pre>[16/Sep/2001:17:25:54][2047.76805][-conn28-] Error: missing "
missing "
    while compiling
"ns_puts -nonewline  [reiterate_through_chunk $db news"
    invoked from within chunk: 0 of adp:
/var/lib/aolserver/servers/defaultacs/www/index2.adp
[16/Sep/2001:17:25:54][2047.76805][-conn28-] Error: missing "
missing "
    while compiling
"ns_puts -nonewline  [reiterate_through_chunk acs threads"
    invoked from within chunk: 1 of adp:
/var/lib/aolserver/servers/defaultacs/www/index2.adp
10.104.168.5 - - [16/Sep/2001:17:25:54 -0400] "GET /index2.adp
HTTP/1.1" 200 4941 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i686; en-US;
0.7) Gecko/20010316"
10.104.168.5 - - [16/Sep/2001:17:25:54 -0400] "GET /css/gilprice.css
HTTP/1.1" 200 3054 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i686; en-US;
0.7) Gecko/20010316"</pre>

<p>Thanks, now I think I got it all in...