[AC-Admins] New Website! [NEED INFO]

[Pippin Bear]

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 01:39:20PM -0400, Solei wrote:
> If you go to the main site, index.php,  The code looks like this:

Yeah.  That requires PHP, of course, and also means each server will have
to have an up to date copy of your PHP scripts.  (As far as I know, no
one's yet extended PHP to be able to transparently load script fragments
remotely...)  The advantage of using a CSS style sheet is that we can all
have our individual pages refer to the style sheet on the main web site.
No scripts to keep up to date on every server.

> right now I put together in 3 hours last night), one only has to edit 
> top.php, and the rest of the site will follow suit. :3   Awesome, no?

Oh yeah, awesome.  It's called templating and I put an entire book-length
document on the web that way a couple of years ago using the TT2
templating system:

http://www.netproject.com/docs/migoss/

(Incidentally it appears someone's been and removed some of the images
and thus broken that web site since I left that company, so I just went
and put the images back in place.  Why oh why do I do these things?)

The document was originally written in openoffice, so it also required
a *LOT* of perl to munge it into a suitable form for webifying.  (Did I
ever mention how much I hate DTP/wordprocessor-style visual markup?
Jayzus it gets nasty.)  A horrifying amount of perl, in fact.  Munging
in an automated fashion was required because it would be necessary to
re-munge it every so often to follow revisions in the orignal document.
Of course, I don't think the document ever got updated again after that
first release.  Typical!

I can't pretend the visual design of netproject's web site is much cop
(I'm mainly responsible for it, other than taking the initial idea from a
mockup someone had done previously) but the CSS and templating was kinda
fun at the time.  Getting the CSS to work right on IE was not so fun.

Incidentally, I'd honestly recommend an off-line tmeplating system
which doesn't execute code in response to every page request, rather
than something like PHP.  But maybe that's just me being miserly about
CPU cycles.

But then, I suppose you're the one actually doing the work, so feel free
to do it the way you think is best.  Don't let anyone else's experience
tell you otherwise. :P

I'll get that map updated sometime later this week, hopefully.

Pippin, busybear