webgen users - Mar 2009 - 2 questions: printable version / labels

Hi,

I''m thinking of using webgen to make website containing restaurant
reviews. I''ve been playing around with webgen and reading the docs,
but it''s not quite clear to me yet, whether the following things are
already possible and if not, how difficult it would be to implement
them:

- I''d like to automatically create a version intended for printing
(i.e. without site navigation and with minimal markup) of certain
pages. Is there already a standard way of doing this? If not, would
the solution be to write an extra content processor which does this?
(Maybe someone else here has already written an extension for this?)

- Is there a way of indexing articles by different properties? E.g.
labeling restaurants per ''genre'' and per price range?
I''m thinking I
could use the tags from the blogging functionality for this, but that
would only give me one index (e.g. I could use tags to allocate
genres, but then I wouldn''t have another label for the price range).
Would it be complicated to duplicate the tags functionality in order
to have multiple indexes? (by the way: How do I actually use the
blogging features? :) )

thanks for any advice!

Thomas

> - I''d like to automatically create a version intended for printing
> (i.e. without site navigation and with minimal markup) of certain
> pages. Is there already a standard way of doing this? If not, would
> the solution be to write an extra content processor which does this?
> (Maybe someone else here has already written an extension for this?)
If you mean creating PDF documents for your page files, I don''t know of
any extension that can do that right now. However, the standard way of
doing this, I believe, is using CSS and providing separate stylesheets
for print and screen environments. It is easy to disable/hide certain
parts of web site with CSS and CSS also provides options for inserting
page breaks and the like.
 
> - Is there a way of indexing articles by different properties? E.g.
> labeling restaurants per ''genre'' and per price range?
I''m thinking I
> could use the tags from the blogging functionality for this, but that
> would only give me one index (e.g. I could use tags to allocate
> genres, but then I wouldn''t have another label for the price
range).
> Would it be complicated to duplicate the tags functionality in order
> to have multiple indexes? (by the way: How do I actually use the
> blogging features? :) )
There is currently nothing implemented regarding tags or blog support,
the only thing existing is automatic generation of feeds. Complete blog
support is planned (since a long time actually :-( ) but not
implemented currently.

By the way: what exactly do you mean by indexing? If you want to list
pages according to certain meta information, this should be doable by
using some ERB fragments in your page/template files. Naturally, this
would mean that you need a basic knowledge of the Ruby programming
language. However, if you tell me enough of what you want to do, I
should be able to jumpstart your coding.

-- Thomas

On Mar 30, 4:58?pm, Thomas Leitner <t_leit... at gmx.at>
wrote:
> > - I''d like to automatically create a version intended for
printing
> > (i.e. without site navigation and with minimal markup) of certain
> > pages. Is there already a standard way of doing this? If not, would
> > the solution be to write an extra content processor which does this?
> > (Maybe someone else here has already written an extension for this?)
>
> If you mean creating PDF documents for your page files, I don''t
know of
> any extension that can do that right now. However, the standard way of
> doing this, I believe, is using CSS and providing separate stylesheets
> for print and screen environments. It is easy to disable/hide certain
> parts of web site with CSS and CSS also provides options for inserting
> page breaks and the like.
>
Doing it using CSS is what I meant. I''d like to make webgen generate
the normal webpage and the html-file intended for printing (which
would, indeed, use some  different and sobre css) from a single .page
file. I just don''t know what would be the most elegant and efficient
way to do it.
> > - Is there a way of indexing articles by different properties? E.g.
> > labeling restaurants per ''genre'' and per price
range? I''m thinking I
> > could use the tags from the blogging functionality for this, but that
> > would only give me one index (e.g. I could use tags to allocate
> > genres, but then I wouldn''t have another label for the price
range).
> > Would it be complicated to duplicate the tags functionality in order
> > to have multiple indexes? (by the way: How do I actually use the
> > blogging features? :) )
>
> There is currently nothing implemented regarding tags or blog support,
> the only thing existing is automatic generation of feeds. Complete blog
> support is planned (since a long time actually :-( ) but not
> implemented currently.
>
> By the way: what exactly do you mean by indexing? If you want to list
> pages according to certain meta information, this should be doable by
> using some ERB fragments in your page/template files. Naturally, this
> would mean that you need a basic knowledge of the Ruby programming
> language. However, if you tell me enough of what you want to do, I
> should be able to jumpstart your coding.
This is also what I meant. It just wasn''t clear to me to what extent
the blogging support was already implemented :)
I''d like to add meta-information to certain .page files and then list
these on overview pages. Sticking with the restaurant page, such .page
file would contain a section like
---
style: thai food
pricerange: expensive
---
and there would be an overview page listing all styles and all price
ranges, and a page for each style, listing all restaurants in that
style. I don''t want to ask you to do the coding, but if you could give
me some pointers as to how this would fit best into the webgen
framework, I''d sure be grateful :)
I''ve toyed with php scripted pages before, so I guess I should be able
to pull this off when I learn some ruby...
>
> -- Thomas
> _______________________________________________
> webgen-users mailing list
> webgen-us... at
rubyforge.orghttp://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/webgen-users

> Doing it using CSS is what I meant. I''d like to make webgen
generate
> the normal webpage and the html-file intended for printing (which
> would, indeed, use some  different and sobre css) from a single .page
> file. I just don''t know what would be the most elegant and
efficient
> way to do it.
Okay, then just use the page files as they were mainly intended to,
namely to generate one HTML file from one page file and specify two
different CSS files in your default.template: one for the screen
version and one for the print version. This can be done like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{relocatable: screen.css}"
type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{relocatable: print.css}"
type="text/css" media="print" />
> > By the way: what exactly do you mean by indexing? If you want to
> > list pages according to certain meta information, this should be
> > doable by using some ERB fragments in your page/template files.
> > Naturally, this would mean that you need a basic knowledge of the
> > Ruby programming language. However, if you tell me enough of what
> > you want to do, I should be able to jumpstart your coding.
> This is also what I meant. It just wasn''t clear to me to what
extent
> the blogging support was already implemented :)
> I''d like to add meta-information to certain .page files and then
list
> these on overview pages. Sticking with the restaurant page, such .page
> file would contain a section like
> ---
> style: thai food
> pricerange: expensive
> ---
> and there would be an overview page listing all styles and all price
> ranges, and a page for each style, listing all restaurants in that
> style. I don''t want to ask you to do the coding, but if you could
give
> me some pointers as to how this would fit best into the webgen
> framework, I''d sure be grateful :)
> I''ve toyed with php scripted pages before, so I guess I should be
able
> to pull this off when I learn some ruby...
I assume that you have the following files under src/:

    /overview.page
    /restaurants/rest1.page
    /restaurants/rest2.page

Then you can start with the following fragment for listing the styles
for the overview page:

    Listing all styles:
    <%
    context.content_node.tree[''/restaurants''].children.select
{|c| c[''kind''] == ''page''}.
            collect {|c| c[''style'']}.uniq.sort.each do |style|
      style_node = ''/style_'' + style.tr('' '',
''_'') + ''.html''
    %>
    <%= context.dest_node.link_to(style_node) %>
    <% end %>

It works exactly the same for the price range listing but you have to
replace the word ''style'' for ''pricerange'' in
the code above.

The code searches for all page files under the ''/restaurants''
directory
and collects all style meta informations (`.uniq.sort` removes
duplicates and sorts the entries by name). Since each style has its own
page file, the canoncial name for the style node is constructed and
finally a link to the style node is put into the page file.

So, this is the easy part. What''s more difficult, is to generate a
style/price range file for each style/price range. Generating files is
normally done using source handlers. However, this is not needed here
since the file that would be used the source handler, would be empty.
Also, since the overview page lists alls styles and price ranges it
would be the ideal page to generate the other ones since every page
listed here would definitely be needed. This can be done by either
creating a specific tag which, for example, lists all styles and
creates the style page (or the price range equivalents) or by a small
helper function. I would go for the tag!

The tikz tag does something similar: it generates image nodes when
called so you may have a look at source code for it in
lib/webgen/tag/tikz.rb.

-- Thomas

> I assume that you have the following files under src/:
>
> ? ? /overview.page
> ? ? /restaurants/rest1.page
> ? ? /restaurants/rest2.page
>
> Then you can start with the following fragment for listing the styles
> for the overview page:
>
> ? ? Listing all styles:
> ? ? <%
> ? ?
context.content_node.tree[''/restaurants''].children.select {|c|
c[''kind''] == ''page''}.
> ? ? ? ? ? ? collect {|c| c[''style'']}.uniq.sort.each do
|style|
> ? ? ? style_node = ''/style_'' + style.tr(''
'', ''_'') + ''.html''
> ? ? %>
> ? ? <%= context.dest_node.link_to(style_node) %>
> ? ? <% end %>
First of all: thanks for the advice

I''ve been trying to get this to work, but I''m running into
some
trouble. For testing, I created 2 .page files under /restaurants, one
with the meta-information ''style: Thai'' and one with
''style: Dutch''.
Then I created ''styleoverview.page'' with the above code, and
manually
added ''style_Dutch.page'' and
''style_Thai.page'' to the root directory.
(Creating these pages programmatically with a tag will be the next
step).

I ran into the following error:
"An error has occurred:   Erb processing failed in </
styleoverview.en.html>: undefined method `routing_node'' for "/
style_Dutch.html":String"

I browsed the API, and I think for the method call ''link_to
(style_node)'' to work, the variable style_node should contain a node,
instead of a string, as in the example code you gave? I tried solving
this by changing the code into

<%
context.content_node.tree[''/restaurants''].children.select {|c|
c
[''kind''] == ''page''}.
collect {|c| c[''style'']}.uniq.sort.each do |style|
       style_node = context.content_node.resolve(''/style_'' +
style.tr
('' '', ''_'') + ''.html'')
%>
<%= context.dest_node.link_to(style_node) %>
<% end %>
(I manually created nodes with the appropriate page files)

but this gives me the error
"An error has occurred:   Erb processing failed in </
styleoverview.en.html>: undefined method `[]'' for nil:NilClass"

I''m a bit lost here...

> I ran into the following error:
> "An error has occurred:   Erb processing failed in </
> styleoverview.en.html>: undefined method `routing_node'' for
"/
> style_Dutch.html":String"
Sorry, my mistake, the Node#link_to method takes a node as you already
found out.
> I browsed the API, and I think for the method call ''link_to
> (style_node)'' to work, the variable style_node should contain a
node,
> instead of a string, as in the example code you gave? I tried solving
> this by changing the code into
> 
> <%
> context.content_node.tree[''/restaurants''].children.select
{|c| c
> [''kind''] == ''page''}.
> collect {|c| c[''style'']}.uniq.sort.each do |style|
>        style_node =
context.content_node.resolve(''/style_'' + style.tr
> ('' '', ''_'') + ''.html'')
> %>
> <%= context.dest_node.link_to(style_node) %>
> <% end %>
> (I manually created nodes with the appropriate page files)
> 
> but this gives me the error
> "An error has occurred:   Erb processing failed in </
> styleoverview.en.html>: undefined method `[]'' for
nil:NilClass"
Try this:

    Listing all styles:
    <%
    context.content_node.tree[''/restaurants''].children.select
{|c| c[''kind''] == ''page''}.
            collect {|c| c[''style'']}.uniq.sort.each do |style|
      style_path = ''/style_'' + style.downcase.tr(''
'', ''_'') + ''.html''
      style_node = context.ref_node.resolve(style_path,
context.content_node.lang)
    %>
    <%= context.dest_node.link_to(style_node) %>
    <% end %>

The problem was that the call to Node#resolve tried to resolve the path
without a language which naturally failed. After adding the needed
language as second parameter it works.

-- Thomas

ps. Sorry for the late answer, been on vacation the last week.

Yes, that works fine. I somehow missed that resolve() takes 2
arguments, though its written there quite clearly.

On Apr 13, 10:03?am, Thomas Leitner <t_leit... at gmx.at>
wrote:
> > I ran into the following error:
> > "An error has occurred: ? Erb processing failed in </
> > styleoverview.en.html>: undefined method `routing_node''
for "/
> > style_Dutch.html":String"
>
> Sorry, my mistake, the Node#link_to method takes a node as you already
> found out.
>
>
>
> > I browsed the API, and I think for the method call ''link_to
> > (style_node)'' to work, the variable style_node should contain
a node,
> > instead of a string, as in the example code you gave? I tried solving
> > this by changing the code into
>
> > <%
> >
context.content_node.tree[''/restaurants''].children.select {|c|
c
> > [''kind''] == ''page''}.
> > collect {|c| c[''style'']}.uniq.sort.each do |style|
> > ? ? ? ?style_node =
context.content_node.resolve(''/style_'' + style.tr
> > ('' '', ''_'') +
''.html'')
> > %>
> > <%= context.dest_node.link_to(style_node) %>
> > <% end %>
> > (I manually created nodes with the appropriate page files)
>
> > but this gives me the error
> > "An error has occurred: ? Erb processing failed in </
> > styleoverview.en.html>: undefined method `[]'' for
nil:NilClass"
>
> Try this:
>
> ? ? Listing all styles:
> ? ? <%
> ? ?
context.content_node.tree[''/restaurants''].children.select {|c|
c[''kind''] == ''page''}.
> ? ? ? ? ? ? collect {|c| c[''style'']}.uniq.sort.each do
|style|
> ? ? ? style_path = ''/style_'' +
style.downcase.tr('' '', ''_'') +
''.html''
> ? ? ? style_node = context.ref_node.resolve(style_path,
context.content_node.lang)
> ? ? %>
> ? ? <%= context.dest_node.link_to(style_node) %>
> ? ? <% end %>
>
> The problem was that the call to Node#resolve tried to resolve the path
> without a language which naturally failed. After adding the needed
> language as second parameter it works.
>
> -- Thomas
>
> ps. Sorry for the late answer, been on vacation the last week.
> _______________________________________________
> webgen-users mailing list
> webgen-us... at
rubyforge.orghttp://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/webgen-users