ArsDigita Community System

Kragen Sitaker (kragen@pobox.com)
Fri, 18 Dec 1998 12:33:27 -0500 (EST)

Greenspun has released his "ArsDigita Community System"
<URL:http://photo.net/wtr/using-the-acs.html>. It's an open-source web
publishing system that runs on AOLserver and Oracle. It includes
facilities for
- Q&A fora,
- classified-ad services,
- user-added comments on (relatively) static pages, etc.
<URL:http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/community.html> would seem to imply
that it also includes
- a database of users,
- a database of metadata about "content",
- software for tracking of who reads what and clicks through to where,
- hooks for sending email to people when arbitrary events happen (the example
given is that someone posts an ad containing the word "Linhof"),
- hooks for doing things (like requesting information) from registered
users on their Nth visit,
- software for user rating of pages,
- a "related links" system so people can attach links to their own pages to
your static pages (similar to Ka-Ping Yee's http://crit.org/
CritLink facility, but not as easy to use, and owned by the
person who owns the page, so squelching irrelevant links is up to
them)
- threaded discussion fora (a superset of Q&A fora),
- billing of charge cards,
- banner ads,
- endless etc.

I am, of course, interested in porting this to Apache with PostgreSQL,
or some similar platform. I understand Neosoft has embedded a Tcl
interpreter into Apache for their NeoWebScript product
<URL:http://www.neosoft.com/neowebscript/> which is free for use in
insecure servers, but has restrictions on its commercial redistribution
<URL:ftp://ftp.neosoft.com/pub/tcl/neowebscript/neowebscript-3.0.LICENSE>;
AFAIK, there aren't any other embeddings of Tcl into Apache (although
earlier versions of NeoWebScript are under a more liberal license.)

I also understand that AOLserver's Tcl APIs are documented online
<URL:http://www.aolserver.com/server/documentation.html>, Apache is now
supporting multithreaded server processes, and the base Tcl
distribution is now thread-safe. So it should be possible to make
Apache look like AOLserver.

I'm curious what kinds of dependencies ACS has on Oracle. Is it just
Cassandracle, or is it more extensive than that?

To FoRKers: how's my SNR? Am I contributing good bits to FoRK so far?

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
"Why are you withholding me?" -- name withheld  "Oh... And dig this:  I
am a fish.  'Nuff said." -- Joe Blaylock (no further explanation)
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