Hi all I'm another lurker, although I read, and occasionally understand, the dev list. Addi and Gav sum have already said some of this.
Forrest is great for simple website construction - I've used it quite a bit to knock up 'mocks' - test sites to see how a navigation scheme works - but doing anything more complicated takes me out of my depth very quickly. The features I really like are the 'forrest run' local server implementation, and the Dispatcher. As Gavin pointed out Forrest, in it's current state, is not suitable for end users (people who aren't prepared to use command line based applications). I'm not sure about the internal workings, but I think a number of issues would need to be addressed to move Forrest towards being a more popular system/application/framework: 1) The XHTML2 internal format conversion would make getting material into Forrest a lot simpler. I use a Jedit plugin called Xilize a lot to mark up text into HTML. Xilize produces valid XHTML and, in the next version, will allow the markup to be directed to a target directory. Make that directory the source for Forrest and you have a nice little on-the-fly text or 'simple markup to website' generator. I'd seriously consider using that for generating intranet pages in my work. 2) The documentation conversions need to be slicker - if you are going to convert Open Office or Word to HTML the resulting code should strip empty elements, or elements containing nothing but non-breaking spaces. PDF output should be addressed with the Dispatcher - there doesn't seem much point in offering a 'ready for print' output format, and not giving control over the layout. 3) Maybe Forrest needs some sort of graphic interface. The bar has moved a lot in the last year on what people expect from applications. DabbleDb (http://dabbledb.com/) Writely and Google Calendar are indications of the direction things are going. Maybe something like Brothercake's docking boxes interface http://www.brothercake.com/site/resources/scripts/dbx/ would make a nice Dispatcher page design tool. I'm not advocating doing away with the text-based configuration files, once set up there's no quicker way to check settings - just make setting-up phase more friendly for non-geeks. Overall, I think any move towards making Forrest a little more approachable has to be good. Maybe some of this stuff should be put to the user list: after all, open source shouldn't just be about 'if you want it, do it yourself'. paul b
