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NAME

Apache::Wyrd::Site - Wyrds for site maintenance and integration

DESCRIPTION

The Apache::Wyrd::Site::* modules present re-useable solutions to a few of the common problems of getting a web site to be integrated and self-maintaining. They are kept separate from the other modules in the Apache::Wyrd hierarchy because they follow a more rigid set of conventions on site construction than the other modules, and would introduce inflexibility to the other Modules if more closely integrated.

As a whole, they represent the more functional aspects of a "house style", which makes several assumptions:

The host system is Unix-like, following a process model
The apache version is < 2.0 with multiple listening processes
There is no more than one Wyrd namespace per virtual host
The site is organized hierarchically in one or more trees
Each tree is a "section" with a single parent node as its root
Each tree node is either a leaf or a joint between one or more branches
Each node is a "Page", with a distinct title, subject, and contents
Each Page either has a parent Page or is a section root
Each Page exists in an HTML file, and that file's name ends with ".html"

Additionally, some more attributes than the standard ones available in the default Apache::Wyrd::Services::Index objects are used by items in the Site hierarcy, and your instance of Apache::Wyrd::Site::Index should include them:

published

Date used in sorting/limiting by date.

parent

Docroot-relative path of the parent Page of the Page (see Apache::Wyrd::Site::NavPull for conventions).

tags

Subject tokens of a given page (see Apache::Wyrd::Site::TagPull for conventions).

For these modules, the Apache::Wyrd::Site::Page object is the base unit of the Site. An Apache::Wyrd::Services::Index-derived object is used by the Site to maintain the cache of meta-information on pages (N.B. One such object is the Apache::Wyrd::Site::Index, which has some additional support methods for objects in this hierarchy.)

The Index keeps track of all Page meta-information: what is the parent of a page, what is its title, its publication date, etc, and also a reverse index for certain attributes, called "maps", which designate which Pages have that attribute (for example, which pages have the word "ocelot" on them, or which pages are tagged "newsletter"). Following this convention, this index object is queried for information either about a specific Page or about what pages match a certain criterion.

Two main classes of objects relate between the Index and the Pages. These are the Pull classes and the Widget classes.

Pulls

A Pull is a list of pages, derived from a map-query to the index. The list is determined by filtering the meta-information for specific values. Additionally, the presentation for each item in the list is different depending on the item's relation to the page on which the pull appears. Pulls are used either to display Pages relevant to a particular topic (TagPulls) or to display the navigation-tree hierarchy of the page in relation to an arbitrary Page, or to the page on which the pull appears (NavPull).

Widgets

A Widget is an object which contains one or more "states" which influence its behavior at the time the Page is requested from the server. Widgets store their page state in the enclosing page and the Page modifies links in the widget to preserve the state of Widgets on the page between page serves.

Additionally, Widgets allow dynamic content to "filter up" into the meta-information stored for a Page object, so that the problem of word-searching for dynamic content on a page is solved by refreshing the meta-information cache of a page when the dynamic content on it changes. Often, Widget objects are used to contain Pulls in this way so that word-search data on a page is kept accurate.

IndexBots

The question of how to efficiently create onetime "builds" of the Index cache is answered by the [MySQL]IndexBot class. This is a combination Wyrd and Bot (See Apache::Wyrd::Bot), which when served up causes an Apache::Wyrd::Bot process to be launched in the background, systematically requesting every page in the site to be served up, causing the index on each page to be refreshed. The bredth of these requests can be limited by file modification date since a cached date to reduce the time for this build to take.

Other Objects in the Apache::Wyrd::Site Hierarchy

This hierarchy is meant to be somewhat more volitile than the rest of the Apache::Wyrd classes. As useful objects following these conventions come into common usage, they will be added to the area, but may not be adequately documented or feature-frozen until their development has stabilized.

AUTHOR

Barry King <wyrd@nospam.wyrdwright.com>

SEE ALSO

Apache::Wyrd

General-purpose HTML-embeddable perl object

LICENSE

Copyright 2002-2007 Wyrdwright, Inc. and licensed under the GNU GPL.

See LICENSE under the documentation for Apache::Wyrd.