mhonarc-users

WebArchives with replies from the archives under MHonArc

2000-07-03 21:35:09

A while back I referred to a project I was working on of getting
MHonArc and PHP4/PHPLib to produce web archives for mailing lists
that support replying to the archived messages with proper quoting,
In-Reply-To/References headers and all the rest, right there from
the web page.

v1.0 is now up and can be seen at the pages under:

  http://www.kanga.nu/archives/

Note that some list archives support replying, and some don't
(simple per-list configuration).  eg:

  http://www.kanga.nu/archives/IRead-L/2000Q2/msg00001.php  (replyable)
  http://www.kanga.nu/archives/ICGnu-L/1998Q3/msg00783.php  (no reply)

Software requirements: 

  PHP4     (not PHP3, it needs the <<<herefile supports from PHP4)
  PHPLib   (uses PHPLib templates (abuses them more))
  MHonArc  (of course)

This is not finished but does in general work.  Some of the data
abstractions need cleaning such as the use of variables.rc vs
thislist.inc (pleasantly thislist.inc overrides variables.rc) and
the PHP-based SMTP engine should be extracted into a standalone
function that can talk to any named SMTP server, and there are many
other crudities, but all the basics are there ATM.  You can find the
relevant sources under:

  ftp://ftp.kanga.nu/pub/Kanga.Nu/WebArchives/

An advantage of this approach in general is that the archive pages
are now templatised and you can change the entire presentation of
your archive pages as your site changes or even dynamically
tailoring them to the browser's login or how he got to that page,
without having to regen your archives.

If anyone decides to use or build something off this setup, I'd
appreciate an email.

Aside:

  It would take little work to go from here to having all the
message data in a DB.  With the current setup MHonArc produces PHP
files which consist only of variable assignments for the various
extracted message sections.  As PHP files can be setup to execute
from the command line, it would be fairly simple to post-process
those files to insert the variable values into a DB and to then have 
the new equivalent of msg_page.inc do the appropriate SQL queries
based on the $msg_num as extracted from the URL.

-- 
"Show me the way to go $HOME"                Home: claw(_at_)kanga(_dot_)nu
J C Lawrence                               Other: coder(_at_)kanga(_dot_)nu
----------(*)                     Keys etc: finger claw(_at_)kanga(_dot_)nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--

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