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Ask Slashdot: Live Update Web Pages on Linux?
Mike
wonders about the following issue:
"I am working on development of a Linux hosted web server
that will allow users to edit their own web spaces. I
realize that there is FTP for file/web-page management
purposes, but for many of my users, this would be a
disaster, since they don't understand the in's & out's of
managing a site thru FTP. Are there some kind of
extensions for Apache (or any other Linux-based servers)
that allow me to do live & in-place editing?"
I wonder if something like this is necessary with the
difficulty of FTP becoming less of an issue with the better
of the graphical clients out there. It allows users to use
better Web Development tools on their own machines as well.
What do you all think?
I got hassled into installing frontpage extensions on our Solaris/apache1.2.6 web server about a year ago. The users really like it as it gives them a lot of creative power. The downside is that it is a *really_dirty_hack*. The docs look pretty but they bear no resemblance to the actual installation procedure, they are *CHALLENGING* to install. Our webmaster now wants me to add some new "sub-webs" for more user groups. I ran the fpsvadmin program to show him how cryptic it is and asked him if he wanted to take responsibility to our Intranet to be down for a day if we mis-understood the completely un-documented software. He backed out faster than I would!
If you can get away with it DON'T INSTALL FP as it is a cancer that will keep webmasters and users on your back to restore pages thay have killed and to change the structure of the web. The security is completely non-existant. Stay away from it, it is rubbish, users love it, but your admin time will increase enormously and your security will dissappear.
Peter
I am making a web based file manager you might want to look at. It is pretty extensive already. New stuff being added as we speak. http://www.edlund.org/projects/drall/
I have dabbled with the FrontPage extensions, and I must say that I have never seen a more horrid hack. Not only are the insecure, but just not implimented well. A good idea that went VERY wrong.
First there is of course CVS from http://www.cyclic.com. CVS isn't just for source code you know. It provides all that's needed to do complete web site management between a number of webmasters at once. It keeps a copy of every revision of every file, giving you access to it in case you change something by mistake. Other control systems like Aegis and RCS are equally usable.
:)
There are MS Frontpage Extentions from http://www.rtr.com for Apache. These automate common tasks such as access controls, simple CGI. Frontpage, even thought it is a Microsoft product, isn't that bad of a program. It provides a fairly good UI for WYSIWYG editing of web pages along with a file manager resembling Microsoft Explorer. Frontpage 2000 will also feature a way to directly access your web pages from Microsoft Explorer via Network Neighborhood... which is pretty cool.
There is WebDAV from http://www.webdav.org for Apache. WebDAV is the "standard" extensions for Apache for web site editing. All your favorite programs should be using it in the future including Frontpage 2000, Dreamweaver (unconfirmed.. but hinted at), etc. It is currently supported by IE5's little editor dealy as well as a few simple clients for Unix.
More and more webmasters are having to conceed to using a WYSIWYG editor, as well they should. Web standards today are not exactly the simple tags they used to be. You have CSS, XML, XSL, HTML 4 with their complex box algorithms and silly incompatibilities between web browsers which make WYSIWYG programs very attractive. WYSIWYG editors have their place, don't dismiss them simply because the common-folk use them as well.
Then again, don't abandon source editing altogether, nothing beats a text editor when you need a quick fix
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
If they just have to edit the pages them selves, teaching 'em a simple GUI ftp proggy (for graphics) and give 'em a HTML editor that can save to FTP sites. BBEdit does for MacOS, and I'm sure there's a few for windows as well.
I have dabbled with the FrontPage extensions, and I must say that I have never seen a more horrid hack. Not only are the insecure, but just not implimented well. A good idea that went VERY wrong.
Hehe, that's hilarious.... A job I had a while back had 4 MC*'s (2 MCSE, 2 MCP) and none of them would allow either IIS/NT serving, or Frontpage extensions on the Linux servers, but they'd plug M$ whereever they would go....
Capitalists are hilarious.
-Erik-
Zope can handle large volumes -- see their page on case studies -- several online newspapers use it on a commercial basis for high volume/high traffic situations.
They also have a chat board product (with threaded discussions) that you can plug in. Zope also has an indexing facility built-in that automatically gives you a search capability.
As for editing, Zope has just implemented WebDAV which allows for distributed authoring and versioning. You can try webdav editing with IE 5.0 and Zope to see if this fulfills your needs.
You manage the entire website with just a browser 99.99% of the time, so you don't have to worry about deploying client software.
It also has an ACL like hierarchy based user access/security interface so you can fine tune the capabilities that you give your users to access or modify your data.
As for converting your back issue articles, it maybe just possible to use ftp to transfer all your back-issue html files into zope. Zope has a builtin ftp server that can be used to transfer files between your ftpclient and the webserver's internal object database.
If this is not what you want, you can probably create a program to do that for you. Its all open source, so the code is available for your modifications.
It also has a dynamic community of Zope advocates that are very helpful in bringing newbies up to speed. They have an active mailing list you can join.
In terms of commercial support, Zope is backed by a commercial company, Digital Creations, who originally created the software as proprietary closed source and saw the light, turned it into open source. If you want commercial support or do it quickly you can hire those guys.
Now, the negatives (not entirely). Zope uses a scripting language named DTML (document markup template language) -- it's like HTML which is easy enough to learn but also subtle enough that it can take a while to become an expert in. Also, while not required, it would help a lot if you know Python, because that's what its written in.
I would urge you to try it out or at least check out the web site( www.zope.org) because I'm certainly impressed by it and all the people I know who started using it are also mightily impressed by it.
Look at the DAV extensions to Apache. The only sad thing is the best GUI client for DAV right now comes with IE 5.0.... ;-)
sigs are a waste of space
At www.zope.org, you'll find a complete system to do exactly that, complete with transaction-based undo (that is, anything you can do you can undo later, without having to undo anything else if you don't want to) and access-control-list based security. It's open source.
It has database support, and there are modules to handle slashdot-like forums ("Confera"), WebDAV, and many other things. Its default interface (when not using webDAV) is simply HTML -- you can administer (and add content to) your pages from any web browser which supports passwords, frames, and forms.
It's trivial to install, and the default package is essentially a trial (it stes itself up on another port to not get in your way), so it's harmless to play with before you commit. It's a breeze to use, but almost frighteningly powerful.
I'm an experimental sort, so I never learned HTML well enough to make a page look good. Because of Zope, though (and a little help from CSS), my web page was able to inherit the look and feel of my friend's web page, and automatically change when he changed his. So now I provide the technical design, and he makes the site look good -- and there have NEVER been any maintainance headaches, and we both know that if someday there were it wouldn't matter because we could always 'undo' the problem.
Get it. Learn it. Live it. Zope.
-Billy
Actually, I wouldn't recommend scripts from that site, unless you're begging to get rooted (suid is going to be needed for file upload)
I think it is necessary. Have you sat and watched newbies attempt to get something up on the web? We are all so used to file structures, HTML goodness, the niceties of networks and everything else required to get working pages from our computer to a server that we forget they are starting from scratch. These are people that break out when faced with saving a file and finding it again from Windows Wordpad. They are the ones that Microsoft included that Most Recently Used Documents pop up a few dozen pixels above the Start button for.
I've watched (and helped) friends get stuff up on Geocities, and they are quite happy to use that frames based JavaScript page builder thing. Some have even graduated to typing their own HTML into the forms based page editor that Geocities makes available. But they have yet to master getting files from here to there. The concept of editing a page on their own machine and then uploading it is still foreign to them. So simple web based tools are necessary and useful to get the neophytes started on one of the things that makes the internet such a revolution in communication, the ability to self publish.
In so many words, yes, it is necessary.
Bleh!
web-dav (web distributed authoring and versioning) is a good first place to check, i think with the appropriate apache module it supports in-place page locking and editing via msie 5. if your user community is semi literate, you might also look into cvs to manage web development, which is easier and more effective imho. HTH
about sean dreilinger
In-place editing is not such a great idea. One editing error can screw up your whole production web site. When I was asked to help a non-savvy friend with her web site, I set her up with FTP Explorer. It looks and works just like Windows explorer. I helped her type in the URL and password, and then I explained: Save your files from word in folder X on your computer. Then open FTP Explorer, and drag all the files into your WWW folder. She's been cruising merrily ever since.
/home/httpd via NFS (since my server and workstation are both Linux) so it acts just like home! (I wouldn't recommend this for the Internet if security is a major concern, or for a production server with newbie users).
On the other hand, for my intranet server, I just mounted
Anyway, good luck!
Vince
Linux help for beginners to advanced users: Control-Escape.com
There are ways to allow browsers to upload files as part of a form submission. As well, your server can be configured to support HTTP PUT commands to certain directories w/authentication.
:)
I don't have any good references on the above, but that should be a start.
æeee!
You could do it with samba, the users would save their files to a network drive like usual (in w98 and NT you can map sambashares using ip instead of wins names). It would also be easy to set up the right create masks to get the permissions right.
Im sure there is a lot of reasons for this not being a good idea, in that case please enlighten me cause I was thinking of setting up something like this
Many neophyte web designers will download the current webpage via http, modify it in FrontPage (which produces microshaft's typical, horrible HTML anyway) and then plaster it over the original via Samba, drag-and-drop FTP, or some other mechanism.
.html files, not .shtml files (and certainly don't let them save HTML over a CGI, but that would never happen, right?). Even then, use of microshaft tools will cause quite surprising page bloat, especially when tables are involved.
All server-side includes, variable, macros, conditional text directives, and just about anything else interesting in the original, before-processing, dynamic HTML file is OBLITERATED. The budding webdesigner doesn't even realize anything is being lost as the original dynamic page is replaced with a static one.
I've seen this happen in several places, different users, etc. It's critical to either:
1) Make sure they're editing the original file with all the tags, includes, etc., visible, or
2) Hide everything behind a cgi-based editing/submission system so they -can't- mangle special parts, or
3) Only let them edit
Another common problem is when symlinks are replaced with normal files in the update process (the enduser usually doesn't even know what symlinks are, and Samba doesn't show them as being different from files and directories either) This can confuse the people who knew what the symlinks were for, and worse, break scripts that depended on them.
Have fun....
Doesn't Netscape Composer pretty much let you do this? It's got a WYSIWYG editor, and then you click on the publish button, which from there you would put in ftp://ftp.mydomain.com/home/users/username/public_ html (or whatever directory you've set up), then put in your username and password, and it will upload the page, and all the associated files.
Is that pretty much what you are looking for?
Hey, I've been looking around at different options for managing an online newspaper, and Zope seems pretty promising, but I was wondering if anybody could give me their opinion of its suitability. Basically, we need to update a large number of articles daily, keep some features rolling continuously, maybe add a chat board, and do some searching. But my big concern is the difficulty of moving existing HTML back issues (several hundred issues and thus many thousands of articles) to Zope. Would this be really tough?
Thanks a lot!
The last place I worked, we hosted some commercial sites for Real Estate Salespeople and other computer-illiterate types.
Using PHP, we had a simple template where they could upload pictures of their properties they were selling, add prices, descriptions, etc. I no longer work there, and did not part on the best of terms, so I no longer have access to the code - or I would gladly share.
I know it was not too much to write it though. PHP is relatively easy to learn.
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
I know that you have been told about many other application servers by now. But there is another one that you might find interesting - Midgard.
Midgard is built over the foundation of PHP3, MySQL and Apache, and works on the ideology that there will be no normal files on the server but rather that all the queries are validated with a database table containing instructions on what to do with incoming URLs.
It is actually easy to create good-looking and effective web-based interfaces with this. I've done it with a few sites, and even normal sales personnel and school people have been able to create content to their pages.
So if you are interested, check Midgard out at http://midgard.greywolves.org. The system is under LGPL, and came publicly available just last night.
I like the system, but then again, it can be said that I have bias...
--
Midgard Project - Open Source CMS
http://c2.com/w2/wiki/WardCunningham
r gPatterns
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki
http://www.bell-labs.com/cgi-user/OrgPatterns/O
I know I posted further up the page, just to comment on reliability, I suggest using apache for the front end sine it appears to restart python servers/services if they happen to die. (ZAP for zope is what I am testing now, and have not had a zope die-off since). The default python web server seems to "shut down" without warning.
Currently ours searches a database (mysql) and has been working great, blows the NT / Oracle server out of the water (and the Zope machine is running on a computer with fewer resources and is doing much more than the NT box). So far, we have put together a server that is faster, feature rich, much easier to use, doesn't crash, and everyone is happy with and done in a couple of months where the NT / oracle equiv. took about six months, crashed continuously, needed more ram than what we had, had no remote admin/ hard to input data, and was SLOW!
Zope Rules!
Hi, I just saw on FM the first release of a program called WebRFM (Remote File Management). Looks like it might be okay for your needs.