Hi everybody, As you all know, there are currently two ways that Cocoon resources are published: either over http or generated on the command line. The way we use Cocoon at Hippo seems to be something of a combination of these two approaches: an http server running an instance of Cocoon functions as a CMS for content editors and explicit publishing commands trigger the exportation of resources to a separate live server that hosts the actual site.
I was wondering about whether or not this would be something that is genarally useful for Cocoon either as a block or core component set. And if so I'd like to know what others think would be the best approach to implement this. I currently see several different possibilities. One that we are using at the moment is that of a separate webservice that creates custom Environments for each resource to be published and passes it to Cocoon to process. The target can be a local filesystem or an FTP server. The client interface to this webservice is very simple but still rather coarse and experimental: the only parameters are the url of the resource to start publishing at and a max-depth parameter that is passed to a crawler. The webservice is configured to map these urls to target locations so that the same system running several different websites can publish these to separate locations. In order for me to adapt the code so as to make it most useful to Cocoon there are several things I would need to decide on. One concerns the way clients make publication requests. My current thinking is to trigger the publication of resources by specifying some special query parameter after the basic url, similar to the way views are currently requested. Another question is how publication targets are chosen. One way is to let the client name a pre-configured publication target to publish to, another is to indicate this in the sitemap, perhaps by providing suplemental information on a pipeline. Thoughts? Unico
