webgen users - Dec 2005 - Features for next webgen release [comp.lang.ruby]

Hi,

Thought I''d reply on the Webgen list, hope that''s okay.
I''m gradually
putting together my personal website with Webgen when I get time to do it  
properly (not got much beyond planning yet though) but I did have a couple  
of things on my wish-list already ;)

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:50:08 -0000, Thomas Leitner <thomas_leitner at
gmx.at>
wrote [in comp.lang.ruby]:
> I''m currently gathering ideas for new features for the next big
webgen
> release (0.4.0). Some of the planned features are:
>
> * RSS feed generation (proposed by Friz Heinrichmeyer)
That would be very nice - I''m planning a blog-ish section and a photo  
album that I''d like to generate RSS from :)
> * blog module (proposed by Fritz Heinrichmeyer)
(Maybe this overlaps with what I propose below? I''d love to know more  
about it).
> * template inheritance (page uses template 1 which uses template 2...)
Is this nested layout, i.e. I could have a layout with three columns, and  
in column 2 is another laid-out page (say, three rows), and in the middle  
of that is the actual requested page? If so, then that would be really  
useful.
> * multiple file handler for one source file
I''m not sure if I''ve just not found the right way to do this
yet, but I''d
like to be able to generate multiple views from a page. I don''t really
know how it could work, but it would be nice to be able to automate having  
certain pages output to multiple formats, maybe even including PDF.
> * GUI application for managing a Web site
I wonder if, instead of building a GUI application, you could instead find  
some way to integrate with the blog packages already out there? I don''t
know a lot about the technologies involved, but maybe you could implement  
something like the metaweblog API (on webrick or something). I''ve
always
used BloGTK for my blogs, and I''m hoping to replace my (dumped) blogs
with
a small blog-like section on the site - it would be really cool if I could  
use my blog package like that.

I appreciate it may seem overkill to implement a whole weblog API locally  
for this, but I don''t know - something that''s worth
considering maybe...
> * XML::Builder intergration for generating HTML output
>
We are considering similar for Rote (but probably for plain XML mainly),  
as well as a similar CSS thing[1]. Maybe it could be useful in webgen...?

Anyway, just some ideas... :)

Cheers,
Ross

(p.s. Good work on Webgen - it''s excellent, so thanks :))

[1] http://lunchroom.lunchboxsoftware.com/articles/2005/08/19/rcss-anyone

-- 
Ross Bamford - rosco at roscopeco.co.uk