Sep
19
2004

Pittwater external rendering is kinda cool

Sunday, September 19, 2004 - 12:09:19 am
(Posted Under: Web Development)
Hmm, this temporary use of Pittwater to render the !weblog (with the help of a server side include and cron script) is kinda cool.

The whole idea of the having the functionality of the Pittwater repository, and partial content rendering engine, in an external site is pretty appealing. Keeping all the actual rendering (templates etc.,) off site, and pulling rendered content into placeholders on a published site. I'd certainly be inclined to use something like that.

The trick in my mind would to be keeping the rendered site Pittwater unaware - on a server that knew nothing about Pittwater, and portably and minimalistically pulling rendered content from Pittwater into the published site. In my mind it would be a lot less dynamic than a fully blown Pittwater website. More a case of entering content, then publishing statically on the published website, each time. Unfortunately I can't think of a great wato publish the rendered content into the published site, while keeping the published website (pages/site + server itself) uncoupled from Pittwater. The coolest application in my mind, would be one that used stock standard webpages, without rewrites or CGI. What I'm doing currently (wget + server side includes) seems like the best way to do it with keeping the website and Pittwater very much uncoupled, and the website stock standard. Though, a nicer method would be...well, nicer. I dunno.

An interesting alternative use of Pittwater at the very least anyway. Not having to implement a seperate code base for a mini-repository and XSL transform logic for each site/page you want to render from XML, as I currently do, without going the whole Pittwater site render route, surely would have some kind of wider application, one would think anyway.

It'd also be nice to have the control in motile:markup to only process UBB, not scratch. It's obvious above that scratch is not on the same wavelength as myself. [wink] Actually, what I'd really like is to be able to embed HTML into content, that'd be really sweet. The reason I want to use XML and transform it into HTML is to save work in site redesigns (hey, I'm a programmer - if something follows a template, why not use a template? [smile] ), not the same reasoning as the majority of users would be using the CMS. Being able to add HTML into the XML where required would be great. However, I don't think XSLT would really work, even taking Pittwater out of the picture, as HTML would be XML nodes, not part of the XML content. Oh well, that'd be damn sweet if it was technically possible. Having to emulate another markup code in XML is annoying.

It's just dawned on me, that this is probably the first time I've actually used the Pittwater interface while not being on the clock (not that I just use vi on the clock anyway! [wink] ). It pains me to say, as big as I am on editing the XML (or anything else) directly/on a system level, and as much as I detest web interfaces across the board, this ain't such a bad way to do things. The interface seems to be more appealing when I'm not entering customer data .If the databound form had a GUI formatting editor, and a transparent way to encode formatting in the XML, I could be converted. If there was the whole 'external rendering' functionality described above, I think I'd use Pittwater for a great deal of my site.

Well, maybe I shouldn't get too ahead of myself, it still is a web interface after all, and I haven't lost an hour of typing yet. [wink] But I do notice that the GUI might get a bit too much of a bad wrap in the Swamp.

I'll no doubt be back to vi on Monday. [wink]

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