[rochester-pm-list] Perl Webpage Publishing Systems

[Justin C. Sherrill]

> This brings us to what many of these sites do.  There are packages out
> there, one of them is called "storyboard", I believe, which is set up to
> run like this virtual directory / program.  Storyboard also provides and
> interface to a database, where most of the articles, images, etc.. are
> stored.  It puts everything together into predefined templates, then
> serves out an html page for you to view.  The pathinfo provides the
> information to storyboard as to which article to show you.

It's probably StoryServer that you are thinking of - it was created, if I
recall correctly, to fit the needs of big news organizations like CNN and
other items within the Time Warner media empire.  (In fact, the company that
makes it is still partially owned by TW, I think.)  You can identify a site
using it because the URLs look something like
http://www.site.com/directory/otherdir/1,24,1123,12.html.  The numbers are
references into an internal database.

A similar mechanism is Allaire's Cold Fusion, which is somewhat smaller and
therefore more manageable for smaller projects, as far as I know.  It has
it's own set of bugs and problems, and speed issues, but I don't know
exactly how severe it is.  .cfm is the common extension for pages using that
functionality.

Neither are written in Perl.  They both also cost a lot more than Perl.

Justin C. Sherrill
Rochester Road Runner webmaster
webmaster at rochester.rr.com
"Think slow, type fats."