Tim Williams wrote:
I'm wondering how folks handle dynamic content within their Forrest
sites.
Forrest has a stated goal to provide static representations of sites
where possible. However, some of us do use it in dynamic environments
and now we have plugins we can afford to relax things a little with
respect to dynamic sites.
Having said that, Forrest does not resist dynamic content, it just likes
to see a static alternative wherever possible. For example, Lucene
searches can be replaced by a Google search box.
Specifically, I'm wondering about the following use-cases (there are
others but these are exemplars for discussion:
Before answering specific use cases let me first say that since Forrest
is built on Cocoon you will usually find that the solution for all use
cases are in the Cocoon framework somewhere.
1) Permissions. Do you just use standard web server functionality to
handle permissions? What happens when you web site scales and you
need credentials independent of the server? Has anyone accounted for
that?
See the authorisation block in Cocoon
2) Sessions. Clearly related to the above, what's the approach for a
"session" in Forrest? There was a discussion recently on Cocoon-users
(i think) that asked what if I simply want to change the site header
depending on who the user is?
There are many of ways of working with sessions in Cocoon. The easiest,
but least flexible is to use the {request:*} parameters in the sitemap.
There is also a request generator that allows you to aggregate the
request parameters with the source document. For full flexibility you
should really think about installing the Flow block from Cocoon.
3) Discussion Forum/Bulletin Board. Say I've got a site that's 95%
content but I want to have a simple discussion forum, how do i
integrate it? I've noticed one of the example sites uses IFrames but
that doesn't seem like a very clean solution to me.
Choose the bulletin board software you like and use the HTML generator
to get the relevant content from the forum software and embed it within
a Forrest site like any other source file.
I guess the database plugin answers the question when the *content* is
dynamic, so the question is really when we want to integrate simple
applications into Forrest. Anyway, I throw that out there...
thoughts?
Plugins are your friend :-)
In the past Forrest would probably have resisted these ideas. However,
now we have plugins users/devs can easily create these kinds of
applications without having to fork Forrest. The question is whether
Forrest wants to host these kinds of plugins since they will not work in
a static environment. We'll worry about that later though, they can
always be hosted elsewhere.
Ross
