I'm new on the list, but have owned and played with Spectra since its first
release. We are about to develop our site with it, and it seems a majority
of the bugs are fixed. I've noticed that the hot-fix system at Allaire could
use some enhancements, however. It takes so many steps to tell if you have
all the current hot-fixes, and you feel insecure about your system not bieng
like the ones at Allaire. Often times Allaire can't reproduce your errors
because of differences between systems unknown to the admin. I know that the
people at Allaire read this list, so here goes:
Scenario: Spectra admin updates Spectra
1) On an administrative section of the webtop, there is a page called
"update spectra"
2) Admin goes to the page, and sees a button labeled "update spectra", along
with a warning that it may take up to 5 mintues. The last update date is
shown. Perhaps it would ease admin's minds if an incremental version were
declared: e.g. Spectra 1.5.001-- but this is not needed.
3) The site shows its progress, counting down steps until finished, when it
reloads the page and updates the date.
On the backend, we have a new tag called "update spectra" that will make a
ftp or http request to the allaire site, check for a folder or wddx packet
called "latest" or something like this. It will download these to a temp
directory, and use cffile to replace the old files with the new ones. The
mechanism for replacement could either be using metadata about which
direcory to place the files in, or searching the custom tag directories for
files of that name. To avoid updating files that admins and programers at
the local site have modified, there could be a line of commented code on
every spectra page containing the words "factory seal (remove this line of
description if customizing code)." The update script would skip pages
without the factory seal.
My 2 cents.
Sasha Goodman
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Unsubscribe visit
http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists&body=lists/spectra_talk or send a
message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with 'unsubscribe' in the body.
