[Cedarvalley] Interesting Projects? Sitebuilder

[Stephen D. Wells]

I want to know of any "interesting" projects you're working on.  If you
think this one is interesting, then I'll go through the process of
building it out in subsequent postings and let you upload the code when
it's done.  If this looks like it's working out well with more
participants than just me (hint hint) then it may make for interesting
content to the site...

thoughts?
STEVE
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Problem:

The casino I work for would like a technique for building other casino
websites quickly and easily.  Each website starts with 95 pages of
content which buyers of a new site are free to alter at their whim.

They want to have a designer build three designs of the homepage, have
the client choose a design and then have this program build the site
out, package it and send it off to the client.  The zipping and emailing
is simple so it's the meshing of the template with the 95 pages of
content that I want to describe here.

Rules
#1 I despise maintenance so... 
* New content should easily be added to the site without contacting me
* New templates shouldn't need to be discussed with me
* New variables should easily be inserted without my help

Template
--------
I opted to use an existing template system rather than re-inventing the
wheel and more importantly it must have good documentation that needn't
be discussed with me.  There are really only two choices out there. 
HTML::Template and Template (template-toolkit).  HTML::Template is
simple to setup and use but the template toolkit is much more powerful
and completely separates the processing from the output.  Figuring that
I'm not working with simpletons (I make that mistake a lot -- but I
never learn) and that I'm always ready to follow rule #1, I opted for
the template toolkit.

Link Design
-----------
Rather than have a complex linking system I'm just going to have the
maintainers use the directory structure to help me determine linking
arrangements. The filenames will then be the names of the links.  Here's
a quick example:

base/index.tt
base/signup/index.tt
base/signup/signup.tt
base/contact_us/index.tt
base/contact_us/contact.tt
base/faq/index.tt
base/faq/why_is_there_air.tt
base/faq/why_are_we_here.tt
base/faq/what_is_that_on_my_shoe.tt

using this you can see that the main navigation should point to:

signup | contact us | faq 

and each file within a directory is the name of the link -- what could
be simpler?

should I continue?

STEVE
-- 
Stephen D. Wells <wells at cedarnet.org>