(That’s Application Server Solution in case you were wondering).
This has been painful. I started out with a simple goal: use my week home from work watching Anna and the baby to come up with a solution to my team’s documentation archiving needs. The caveats have been that despite the field, not all team members are as hip with writing HTML, or wiki-text, as the new kids are. So my solution has had to be simple, simple, simple.
I looked at Spine, but spine is really just a nice way to manage a few pages, nothing that lets you interactively build up some content (remember, my goal is a simple documentation area).
Then I gave metadot a good try. The ebuild for metadot wanted me to downgrade my mysql (for shame!), so I broke the ebuild and installed it anyway, correcting the setup sql statement to work in mysql-5. Then I had to fix the mod-perl call (typo). Then I had to make a few more tweaks so that @INC was properly configured. Oh, and a few more edits to get paths to translate right. And after all this work (about 4 or so hours interrupted, but still felt longer) what I had was a site that worked for 90% functionality, but that still had bugs creeping up (like losing the hard-coded paths to its own templates). So about 20 minutes ago I stepped back.
Keep It Simple, Stupid. Paradigm shift time. I’ve been looking for something that let folks upload word docs, etc., and manage them. But that’s not what we really need. What we need is a managed forum/article site. With this thought in mind, I grabbed a copy of YaWPS (Yet another Web Portal System) which is really nothing more than a collection of CGI’s and simple files. No DB backends, no bling-bling, no mod_perl – and no hassles. If I need to extend something, no problem, I can hack something in like nobody’s business. Oh, and that supreme documentation site I thought I needed? I think a well tailored forum will do the trick (it’s inhouse, internal use only anyway).