The story
Read the pre-history if you're interested.
The old system worked well enough, but I was getting tired of its limitations:
- the input was XHTML with annotations (for languages), and writing XHTML by hand is a bit painful
- the structure was very rigid:
- having more than two nesting levels of categories would have required heavy changes to the compiler
- navigation would not have been not very comfortable, if I had added many categories
- these was no way to assign a document to more than one category (the things that nowadays are called "tags")
It was evidently the time to write (or find) something better.
The functions I wanted were:
- input in reStructuredText
- multi-language support:
- each document can exists in different languages
- the user can go from one language to the other via links
- the web server must choose the right version using content negotiation
- presentation defined in XSLT
- each document must be able to define a specific presentation
- support for tags
- reduce to a minimum the amount of writing to create a new document
After a few years of sporadic development, the result is WebCoso
How does it work
At the heart of the thing is a set of declarations for Slay::Maker; these define two passes [3]:
asterisks stand for the language code
- generation of XML:
- files called document.*.rest.tt are processed by Template Toolkit, producing files called document.*.rest.txt
- files called document.*.rest.txt are processed by Text::Restructured producing files called document.*.du.xml
- files called feed.*.tt are processed by Template Toolkit producing files called feed.*.xml
- from reST documents, the system extracts the tags with which each document is associated, and the dates of creation and last modification
- documents in the tags directory are processed like the others, but only after the tag extraction
- generation of (X)HTML and feeds:
- files called document.*.du.xml are processed by XML::LibXSLT using the "stylesheet" du2html.xsl in the same directory, producing files called document.*.html which are stored in the destination directory
- files called feed.*.xml are processed by XML::LibXSLT using the "stylesheet" fillFeed.xsl in the same directory, producing files called feed.*.xml which are stored in the destination directory
Note that the modules that interface Template Toolkit, Text::Restructured and XML::LibXSLT to WebCoso, export various extension functions to allow access to the various data extracted (tags, dates).
At this point all files have been generated, and a couple of rsync (one for the documents, one for images css etc.) will update the copy on the web server.
Future developments
Feed generation is sub-optimal: to get the full text of the documents inside the feeds, each document is transformed multiple times; I should probably add a third pass, specific for feeds, to use the already transformed documents.
There are, surely, functions that are not exported to the templates, and that one day I'll need: they're not hard to add.
