Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC

Collapse
7: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 1)
Posted by xx xx on 01/21/05 12:17 PM
Although BSD systems seem out of your scope, there is a FreeBSD installer. It currently installs a complete OpenACS installation within 1 hour from scratch, just assuming you have the FreeBSD OS running. Using the package system should be faster (if 1 hour is too slow).

1. After a test run (or make fetch-recursive), the /usr/ports/distfiles directory can be tarred and distributed. It will contain everything you need.

2. The installer could be extended to work with different OS using Darwinports.

3. It needs more testing, although it runs fine for me.

4. Nice templates like the ones of Giancarlo Luxardo (I like those) should be in the openACS/.LRN tarballs/CVS if possible.

5. Preloading information may be easy, I think. Create a server with the info you would like to show. Create a nightly or manual backup of this server. Use that tarball and demo that you can take the server from one OS to another (for example RH7 to FreeBSD5 as I did last week..). Does that work between all operating systems? BTW, Peter's install script with data doesn't work on FreeBSD (yet).

Collapse
15: Re: Re: Fast Demo installations - RFC (response to 7)
Posted by Giancarlo Luxardo on 01/23/05 09:55 PM
4. Nice templates like the ones of Giancarlo Luxardo (I like those) should be in the openACS/.LRN tarballs/CVS if possible.

Aldert, I can upload these templates to CVS, the point is that we don't have yet an appropriate location in the repository... Also, I am not sure that it would be really useful, since we have done site-wide customizations (css + adp + tcl), which are not integrated yet with the final 2.1.1.

What I suggest is that we define a directory in CVS for "demo sites", where those who are willing to release a site implementation (a live site or just a test server) can upload a tarball, possibly with some data (i.e. it would be a back-up including content repository and database). It would be good to document the customizations, code branch, etc... Packaging this site into an installer as described in this thread requires more work (on several platforms?), and it might be limited to one "default" installation.

There were recently several discussions related to UI customizations, skins, etc... I think that there are several possible enhancements: moving as much as possible to CSS, get rid of in-line CSS, etc... It would also be nice to have a better integration between ADP and HTML editors. Useful tips for Dreamweaver are given here:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message%5fid=172746

I have found an interesting discussion about csszengarden:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message%5fid=167160
Is there any follow-up?...

Currently OpenACS does not support skinning (it might after changes from CTK are rolled in).

Malte, do you have more details about this?