Forum OpenACS Development: Fixing subsite redirection (again).

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Unfortunately I wasn't aware of this problem at the time, because I have now realized this is very much a showstopper for my main application of OpenACS.

Some background info may be needed here. What I am working on is a common dynamic web page backend for a number (~10) of smallish, closely connected, not-for-profit organizations. Currently their homepages consists of static HTML pages, or, at best, very simple database backed sites based on orphaned technology (ASP, not to be confused with ASP .NET).

The idea is to allow them to link to each their own subsite on a common server from their still static front page, sharing logins, news, etc., but each having their own layout and selection of package functionality. There will be a global, top level subsite below the root, where experienced users can get the big picture of news from all the organisations etc. However in order not to confuse visitors to each organisation homepage, one needs to be able to totally immerse a person into a given subsite.

Also for technical reasons specific to the given server it will be difficult to expose the root of AOLserver. It will in fact not be accessible to the world at all.

Here are a few of the top issues I have stubled upon so far.

*) 'My Homepage' and links plus pages associated with it should be subsite aware. Some of them already are, but strangely not all of them.

*) Redirections during logout should be to the nearest ancestor subsite.

*) The context bar need to be able to generate subsite aware links to 'My Homepage', and one should be able to tell it not to generate links to subsites above level X, the root in particular.

Basically I find myself unable to even incorporate external testers and admins for suggestions and design work before this is fixed, something I'd *really* like to do fairly soon while using instances of the existing packages.

Currently my level of experience with OpenACS is at the ADP+Tcl+simple SQL queries kind of stuff, and I suspect that fixing the redirection issues may not be totally trivial. Not the least because it seems some kind of backward compatibility switch/parameters will be needed in order not to break existing sites upgrading to 4.7.

Thus before I start attempting to fix this myself, or just keep pressing on learning to write my own packages etc. in the hope that this will magically be solved soon, I would like to inquire to the status of these problems. Are people working on this, or is it even on the radar screens out there? The issue still persists in HEAD as of right now, and I don't know what would happen if I just filed it as a bug and forgot about it for the time being.

I would like to offer help with this in every way I can, including doing the grunt work if someone wanted to fix the core issue and then telling me how to do the rest. Some serious handholding would probably be needed though, at least for a start.

Any insight will be appreciated.

Frank.

If you mean to do that for the toolkit in general, please go ahead. It is only confusing and makes the context bar wider than necessary.

I like the style of openacs.org better where the link to your account is your own name, but that's up to the individual implementor. Should we add an includable template (like the one from openacs.org) with the login information in the toolkit?

We would really prefer "Your Profile" (or "My Profile").  In the context of our applications "Your Account" doesn't really fit what we are doing.  So that makes me wonder, should this be a configurable parameter then?

/Lars