Forum OpenACS Q&A: Copy of original DPS templating system?

Does anyone have a tarball of Karl's original Dynamic Publishing
System - the one that uses .data/.adp pages and was originally
released as a tarball from karl.arsdigita.com? I have an old site that
I would like to retro-fit to use templating without introducing the
request-processor and other overhead of upgrading to ACS 3.4.10. When
I found I did not have any original tarballs, I tried asking Karl but
his repository was wiped out in a disk failure on one of our shared
machines. If you have a copy, could you either email it to me, or
upload it somewhere and post a link to this thread.

Thanks in advance,
Cynthia

Cynthia, I have a slightly modified version of the 0.4 release of Karl's Templating System. I've uploaded it here to OpenACS's file storage: https://openacs.org/new-file-storage/one-file.tcl?file_id=310
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Posted by Walter Smith on
Cynthia, I'm not sure if they are what you want, but I have all the versions of the standalone CMS (from which people reportedly extracted the ATS) that were available from cms.arsdigita.com: cms-0.1.tar.tgz, cms-R20001121.tar.tgz, cms-R20001201.tar.tgz, cms-R20001122.tar.tgz, cms-R20001208.tar.tgz 1128, cms-4.1.1.tar.gz, and cms-R20001128.tar.tgz. If there is interest/need I can upload one or more, or I can email them directly.

On a side note, can anyone exlpain how the DPS is different from the ATS...or is it? I have tried (several times!) in vain to get the ATS working, but have not yet gotten it to function properly. The tarball Michael uploaded has many fewer files than the versions of the ATS I have worked with.

I have messed with a couple different versions, but the most promising seemed to be one that was linked in a previous thread at https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=000103&topic_id=OpenACS&topic=. It has since been referred to as "Vlad's tarball" and seems to still be available in its original location at ftp://63.89.89.77/pub/vlad/ats.tgz.

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Posted by Gilbert Wong on
I'm using ATS at work on an old site.  Assuming that you followed the installation instructions correctly, all you need to do is to use the extension ".acs".  For instance, use index.acs to read the templated index.tcl / index.adp pages.  So your browser needs to call http://www.mypage.org/index.acs.  I hope that helps.
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Posted by Cynthia Kiser on
Thanks Michael. What you uploaded is not the full DPS - but it is the part that I was missing. Thanks ever so much. (Note to self: QUIT editing the CVS repository!!!. You WILL regret it.) I put Michael's tcl files into my tcl directory and the templating stuff works. I have not installed the site map and other data models to test them out. But for any other DPS fans out there, I have tarred up what I hope is the full DPS and uploaded it to https://openacs.org/new-file-storage/one-file.tcl?file_id=311

Walter, I am looking into different CMS solutions. I was looking into Edit-this-page (or mod-etp) but would be interested in having a look at the older aD CMS. How about uploading one of your tar balls to file-storage here (in case other folks want to look at it too).

And to answer your DPS/ATS question - the most obvious differences were syntax. The DPS used .data pages written in XML and custom tags in the adp with the form <var name=XXX>. The ATS used .tcl pages to build the datasources and the variables were referenced in the adp page like @varname@. The ATS was more efficient - both because it did not do so much DOM walking, and because it had more sophisticated caching. I have a lot of experience with the ACS 3.4.10 DPS and fairly minimal exposure to the ACS 4.2 ATS (what I wanted from it worked right out of the box), so if you want help with it, email me. We can sort it out and then post back to this thread what the "gottcha" was.

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Posted by Walter Smith on
Cynthia, I've uploaded the last released version of the CMS I've got to https://openacs.org/new-file-storage/one-file.tcl?file_id=318.

Thanks for offering your help in solving my ATS trouble. When trying to run the demo there seem to be problems with the db api, and the variables set in the Tcl code don't even seem to be getting set properly. I'll take you up on your generous offer and email you the details directly.