[plug] Virtual Filesystems & CMS

[James Devenish]

Hi,

In message <200406111336340580.024B3F3A at mail.webace.com.au>
on Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 01:36:34PM +0800, Mark J Gaynor wrote:
> "mysource" by Squiz

UWA have been using MySource for a few years now and they seem to love
it. However, when I recently had a look at using for something, I hit
some of the snags that I had cynically expected (I'm a bit of doubter,
as Trevor appears to be). However, UWA are really making a go of
MySource and UWA's Weboffice seems to "love" it.

In message <200406111028.53530.T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au>
on Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 10:28:53AM +0800, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> Personally, I've found such solutions are more trouble than they're
> worth, with more time spent trying to bend the system to do what used
> to be simple. And I know for a fact that most of them won't integrate
> with some of our other technologies we depend upon (heavy-use of
> Apache mod_perl layered content handlers).

As a user of MySource (as opposed to a backend administrator), I found
serious limitations in its flexibility. To me, some of this arises
because its templates/formats are based on static HTML rather than a
"proper" templating scheme. (As an example, I would probably have been
satisfied if MySource included something analogous to the Velocity
Template Engine http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/). Basically, your
ability to "customise" is severely limited unless you have access to the
PHP backend of MySource. (However, I have not confirmed this with the
Uni, so I might be wrong.) I guess this is not much of a problem for
you, Trevor. 

Also, incorporation of existing server-side scripts was recognised early
on as a snag with MySource. Not sure what's come of this, but I suspect
the general solution has been to have MySource-specific backends
written, so that they integrate with MySource. I guess this is fine if
you are making a gradual transition (as did UWA).

> I'd prefer NOT to keep actual content in a database.

We hit this snag when we wanted to migrate from one MySource server
to another -- were asked to recreate the content on the second server
because there is no trivial way to copy pages from one machine's
database to another!

> Version control - how scalable and useful is an existing system (eg; 

Not sure if MySource has support for revision control. Didn't at UWA
initially, though perhaps it has appeared in subsequent years.

> Access - I could investigate ACLs at the Linux level - but why bother? If 
> people ONLY need access to edit content, then why give them a UNIX account, 
> which adds on other security concerns? I could do a custom WebDAV interface - 
> yet WebDAV seems like one of those cool-yet-underused & stale sort of 
> technologies.

>From my very limited MySource experience, I would think it to be pretty
cool if MySource could interface with WebDAV -- I foresee that it would
effectively increase platform availability of WYSIWYG editing and more
importantly would free up time otherwise spent pressing buttons in the
MySource web interface.

> URI Transparency - One of my pet hates is Web-apps which pretend to be a 
> website, yet have the ugliest CGI-style URLs. Ugh! It's unnecessary! (Sorry - 
> bit of a Rant of mine.)

MySource can do nice things with URLs. E.g. you can have multiple
equivalent URLs: every page has a very brief numeric ID-based address
(good if you want to convery an address over the phone without having to
spell out a string of complicated words and symbols) plus any number of
'human readable' addresses. However, it appears to have some basic
restrictions like not allowing hyphens (have to use underscores
instead).