Project: Paperboy Web Data Manager (PBWDM)

Synopsis:
The Paperboy Web Data Manager is series of programs/scripts for running data-driven websites leveraging the opensource Paperboy RSS project.

Benefits to the Community:
PBWDM will provide a simple, lightweight framework to design a data-driven website without some of the complexity that arises with SQL-based data-driven websites. By providing a simpler way to separate data from presentation, new web developers can be introduced to the concepts of good design even before they make the leap from personal to public design.

Deliverables:
* Commandline utility to generate static formatted pages from data.
* Basic CGI script to generate formatted pages on request, possibly caching them for future access.
* Dynamic CGI script(s) for special pages like a search engine, a random page/entry engine, etc.
* Documentation on installation and usage.
* Documentation on how the programs integrate with Paperboy RSS as a guide for similar future projects.

Project Details:
The Paperboy RSS project is a simple but elegant RSS feed reader. Because of the XSLT-driven elegance, that project can easily be extended to other tasks including website data management. PBWDM will be such an extension and will translate between the XML data layer and the XHTML presentation layer that is served by a webserver like Apache. PBWDM will support two main page types, one for normal pages and one for weblog-type pages. More page types may be added if they become necessary.

PBWDM will be written mainly in Perl though some C code may be involved to improve performance; Where C code is used, a pure Perl version will also be made available. Paperboy RSS uses the opensource libcurl, libxml2, and libxslt libraries for most of its manipulations. For any similar manipulations that cannot be generalized back into the Paperboy RSS project PBWDM will use the same. PBWDM will be cross-platform compatible with Linux, Mac OS X, and other POSIX operating systems; Windows compatibility is subject to the availability of the various F/OSS components (Perl, Paperboy RSS, libcurl, libxml2, libxslt)--most of these are already available--and Windows compatibility is an eventual goal.

Project Schedule:
Week  1 (19 June) -- Design complete project layout, generalized layout for XML databases, method of integrating user-specific preferences and the core code, etc.
Week  3 ( 3 July) -- Begin work on the static page generator
Week  5 (17 July) -- Begin work on the basic CGI
Week  6 (24 July) -- Begin work on the dynamic CGIs, static page generator should be complete
Week  8 ( 7 Aug ) -- Port my personal website to the framework as a test case, all CGIs should be complete
Week  9 (14 Aug ) -- Work on documentation
Week 10 (21 Aug ) -- Finish documentation, work out any remaining issues with the project

Bio:
I am currently finishing prerequisites to enter the Computer Science masters' program at PSU, and received my undergraduate degree in Linguistics at Reed College in 2003. I have worked professionally with web design (both page and site design) and Perl for over eight years. I am one of the core developers and currently acting project manager for the Paperboy RSS project. I have also designed the code generating my personal website using Perl, XML, and XSLT. PBWDM would be a generalization of that project making it more widely useful.

Links:
http://paperboy.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/paperboy/ -- Paperboy RSS site. Content is outdated, a website redesign will be completed before official public release.
http://collab.freegeek.org/~wren/ -- My personal website.
http://www.perlfoundation.org/
http://www.perl.org/ -- Websites for Perl
http://xmlsoft.org/ -- Website for libxml2 library
http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/ -- Website for libxslt library
http://curl.haxx.se/ -- Website for libcurl library