XML website framework thingy

mtombs

I've been working on this thing for a little while, but I have the funny feeling I am reinventing the wheel... heres a quick summary of what I have written, and hopefully you people can tell me if I've been wasting my time.

Basically, its an framework for creating websites. It uses XML wherever possible, so for instance the structure of the site and of the pages is described in XML, and data is extracted from wherever (more on this in a moment) as XML, and the whole lot is put through some XSLT and output as HTML.

The strength of this (in my opinion) is that the content of the pages is always XML, but it can come from lots of different places. I have written various classes that turn a query into XML, get an RSS stream, do a SOAP call, just load an XML file, even one to unzip an OpenOffice.org doc and return the content.

That'll do for a summary... does it sound familiar? Would anybody be interested in this stuff? I have no objections to GPLing it and putting it up on sourceforge, but only if anyone is interested.

bye!

Mark

bubblenut

That sounds really interesting. I say YES.

piersk

Yeah, I'm up for this. Am I right in thinking that it's going to be almost PHP/PostNuke, but with XML instead of MySQL?

I'd like to suggest that instead of discussing more here (and filling up the forum with threads about this), go to http://xml.diablog.co.uk (stored on my own server) and register.

I'm also up for people using my server for development if they want.

Anyway, go to that address above and we can talk more...

mtombs

I'm not that familiar with postnuke and the like, but I was aware of their existence when I started this lark. I don't think this thingy (I really need a good name for it) is another insta-portal, really; it could be, but it could be used for more or less any website. For instance, I used it for a couple of corporate websites - http://www.niku.se and http://www.bergbanan.se .

I'll try and summarise how it works. First, you define a page layout, e.g. columns, rows, put a standard header on the top. Then you define datasources in XML. The xml describes how to get the content XML. Each type of datasource (mysql, RSS, blah blah) has its own handler class that goes and gets the XML and returns it to the central page builder class.
Then you define a component, say a list of latest news headlines. There is an XML file that lists all the components by name, the datasource to use, and the XSLT file to parse the data with. Then, finally, you define a page by giving it a name, saying which layout to use, listing the components on it and where in the layout each component should go. There is an XML file that lists all the pages.

The idea behind all of this is to really separate style and content, and make it extensible (want to get your XML from somewhere else? just write a handler) and re-usable. Still interested?

piersk

Yeah, I'm still interested. Might look into doing an XML CMS later...

Did you get my PM?