UserLand
UserLand to open source Frontier
"To fans of UserLand Software it must seem inevitable that the kernel will go this way, it sure did to me. But I am on the board of directors of the company, and I persuaded my fellow board members that it would be in the company's interest to let the kernel develop separately from the products that build on it. And that's what I want to announce today. At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel. Not sure what license it'll use. There won't be any grand expectations of what kind of community will develop. Even if no bugs get fixed, if no features get added, if no new OSes are supported, it will be worth it, because its future will be assured. That's the point Ted makes, and that's my reasoning behind this.
We decided this quite some time ago, but waited for the right moment to start discussing it publicly. It seems now is the right time, or as good a time as any.
Technorati cosmos for this post. [Scripting News]"
Update: FAQs about the Frontier open source release.
Implementing the 'linkToStyleSheet' macro may cause serious performance hit to busy Manila™ Servers
Erin Clerico pointed out to me yesterday that the KCSOS sever was working much harder than usual. It was just plain slow. Erin noticed that one file was being called more often than any other. It was the CSS for our (very popular) home page.Since the KCSOS home page is so popular we have Manila render that site to a dedicated static server. In addition all images and binary files (gems) are served from this static server. This setup allows our Manila server to focus on our client's web sites and our lower volume departmental sites. Apart from the creation and management of the KCSOS home page, Manila should not have any part of serving it to the public. However, the "stylesheet.css" was being served by Manila directly, due to my use of the "linkToStyleSheet" Macro.
LinkToStyleSheet is a new macro that allows for external Style sheets in Manila. Until its development, Manila served all CSS inline with the html. That system works fine but it's hard to shield Netscape 4.x and other non-CSS compliant browsers from the Stylesheet. Plus external style sheets are better since in theory they cache, and require fewer server resources to serve. The problem with "linkToStyleSheet" is that it serves the styleSheet directly out of the object database - it should go through the motions of writing the file out to the local static server and then the macro should calculate the URL from there.
According to Erin, these are the steps that Manila goes though to serve this simple text document.
"It retrieve a URL for the Gems directory of a particular site, add the file name 'styleSheet.txt' to the URL.Then the browser makes a requst of that URL. Frontier builds a PTA for the request, then inserts a new "word processing" object in the PTA replacing the template, coercing a string in to it and returns the result.
So, a request for that page in Manila causes Manila to serve two pages."
After removing that macro from the site, and simply linking to a standard CSS text file on our static server, Manila returned it to its usual responsive self.
Manila's Modules move out of the shadows
UserLand has posted a new docs page for the module macro that I used in my two newest Manila themes (1, 2). The Creating a Theme page was also updated with instructions on adding modules to a theme.Mail-to-Weblog Is a killer app
This is a feature I have wanted since before there was Manila. As a matter of fact it was how I originally thought a CMS would work, but that was a long time ago. However, as I contemplate a future with Mail-to-Weblog, I am starting to see the possibilities.
If you combine Mail-to-Weblog, with a simple mail-to form (like the MailForm Macro Erin Clerico installed on Weblogger and KCSOS. Here's an example form.) you have created a new way to collect content in a controlled fashion. You can use a simple form with required fields and instruction, giving Manila site a first-class way to collect structured info for things like Classified ads, book reports, and service requests.
Another possibility is that you can have a mail-to form that sends messages to a person for review. That person could just approve by forwarding the message to the super secret email address.
The future is Bright... Thanks UserLand!
Mail-to-Weblog for Manila
The Mail-to-Weblog feature for Manila has been released:"The Mail-to-Weblog feature makes it easy to post to your weblog by simply sending an email to your site. When this feature is enabled, Manila periodically checks for new messages in a POP email account that you specify, and posts new messages whose subject matches your "secret subject" to your weblog."
The feature is available now on all UserLand-hosted Manila sites. Here's how to enable Mail-to-Weblog in your own Manila site.
If you run a Manila server, here's how to enable Mail-to-Weblog for your users.
As a part of this feature, an update to tcp.getMail allows you to supply the address of a callback script, which can determine whether email messages will be deleted from the POP account, or left on the server. [Jake's Radio 'Blog]