The situation:
In a project for an educational institution we would like to use Forrest to create a static web site that can be copied to a cheap and simple Web-Space-provider.
Some pages (about, locations, lecturers etc.) are more or less static and will - for now - be manually ported to xml and referenced in site.xml and tabs.xml in the usual way. That's the easy part!
The pages for all the courses however are to be generated by transformations from one big XML-file (created by exporting their course management system).
This part of the web site will probably have its own Tab ("Courses") with several sub tabs for broader subject areas ("Languages","Cooking","Computer Skills" etc.)and at least two levels of menus.
E.g.
Tab: Courses Subtab: Languages Menu: English Submenu: Level 1 Page: Course outline and listing of individual English Level 1 courses
MY QUESTION:
Since everything below the Courses-Tab needs to be generated from the database, how can I best integrate this with Forrests site.xml and tab.xml.
1. Create the static structure, test it and then use the tested tabs.xml and site.xml as statics building blocks in my transformation.
This seems worst case as changes to the rest of Forrest get complicated.
You're right too complicated.
2. I found several references to book.xml, that it can still be used and is supposed to have priority when found in a directory. Unfortunately I found no more info on
- the required structure of book.xml - how to reference it on site and tabs (or not at all)
Do a "forrest seed" and look inside the samples directory.
Is this deprecated?
No
3. Can I use directory-based selection for only parts of my Forrest? I looks like it for all or none of the site.
Yesterday I committed a small change to how site.xml and tabs.xml are generated for this very reason. You are now able to override the generation of these two files in a project sitemap. So therefore the answer is yes, just create your own pipeline that aggregates the static parts of your structure with the dir generated parts.
4. Is there another way to generate the courses-sections of site and tabs in my transformation, put it into separate files and have Forrest include these into site and tabs when compiling the site?
If you use the IMSManifest plugin (this is exactly why I built it), yes. But this requires you to use IMS Manifests rather than site.xml and tabs.xml. The Burrokeet project ( http://www.burrokeet.org ) provides some assistance in doing this kind of thing, but it is early days.
Finally, last night I started working on the locationmap feature of Forrest. This is not due until 0.8 but I need it, for a remarkably similar use case in the coming months. However, I'm not sure when I will complete work on this.
Ross
