Forum OpenACS Q&A: Peeking at openacs.org source/verbatim...

No, but if you have a specific question like, "How did they do xxx?" we can probably help.

Do you mean like surfing to a web site and seeing the raw Tcl code? At one time ArsDigita hosted a browsable repository. You need to set up a second web server (listening on a different port); in the nsd.tcl config file set enabletclpages to false, disable ADPs, and remap both default and noextension to text/plain (I think) in ns/mimetypes (remove all other mimetypes). Naturally, you could use another web server (like Apache) since you're just serving up HTML and what the server thinks is plain text files.

The only time I found any benefit for such a site was when I wasn't on a PC with the ACS installed. But that's just me.

However, there's far more benefit if you create a standalone documentation web server (for guides, the stuff in /usr/share/doc on a Linux box, kernel docs, the ACS code, AOLserver manuals, PostgreSQL manuals, Oracle HTML docs, etc.) and index it with htdig, swish++, whatever. I've done this on my own machine; htdig takes about an hour to spider and index the documentation server and reports viewing over 30,000 pages. (The htdig database files take up something like 300-400MB, but I keep 'em on a slow drive.)

In the ACS 3.x world, ACES provides a decent example of the kind of stuff Jerry's talking about, as it provides pre-canned classes, communities and code that creates new ones with component parts like file-storage and calendar.  And lots of portlets to do the same.

That was based on 3.4 which in some ways was a bridge between the past and ACS 4.x (it has packages and a request processor, though packaging of packages was incomplete so things are "blurry" in regard to old vs. new paradigms).  So it would be somewhat useful to someone interested in  understanding OpenACS 3.2 groups etc but you'd have to ignore a bunch of 3.4-isms.

In the OpenACS 4 world dotLRN should help out a lot as it will provide ACES functionality integrated with our latest OACS 4 release.  It will be a real world example of how to use subsites, groups etc to build a fairly complex and integrated site.  There's a fair amount of look-and-feel stuff needed for dotLRN, too, so this should serve as a decent example in that area, too.

So ... Jerry, yes you're right and fortunately dotLRN will help folks by providing a real-world example of how to hack look-and-feel and site structure using the toolkit.  Since MIT has already put up a page for dotLRN, maybe they'd be interested in hosting a dotLRN instance with sample classes and commmunities set up as a demo (they'll have a large example set up called SloanSpace but that only helps if you're going to school there!)

As far as the source to this current openacs.org site goes, it could be made available but very, very little hacking/customization has been done.  Do a "view source" and you'll see that there's a stylesheet being referenced and some table stuff to control width, set the nav bar, etc.  All that's going into ad_header presumably, which is why bboards don't share that look-and-feel (because bboard has its own header proc for historical reasons).

So the source could be made available but Barry's need is probably met by telling him to 1) play around by hacking ad_header to see how that changes pages in various modules and 2) check out "view source" to see  the html used to build the index page in particular.  This site doesn't do anything fancy with groups, etc so doesn't serve as a good example in the sense Jerry's thinking of.

But ACES and (later) dotLRN do...

Guys, there's also the ACS 4 API Browser...  Sean, Jerry, and Don and
others have mentioned other, different stuff, but being able to just
read the live code is exactly what Barry was asking for.  The API
Browser let's you read most of what's in the sql/ and tcl/ directories
- basically, almost everything EXCEPT all the individual pages under
the www/ directories.

I assume that once the Musea folks finish the Openacs 4 version of
openacs.org, the API Browser will be there, and it shouldn't be too
hard to extend it a bit so that the site admin can configure things to
let people view the code in the actual pages too.