/ 
Lavoco-Website-0.14
/ Lavoco::Website

NAME

Lavoco::Website - EXPERIMENTAL FRAMEWORK.

Framework to run small websites, URL dispatching based on a flexible config file, rendering Template::Toolkit templates.

VERSION

Version 0.14

SYNOPSIS

A FastCGI web-app for serving Template::Toolkit templates.

This is an experimental framework to control various small websites, use at your own risk.

use Lavoco::Website;

my $website = Lavoco::Website->new( name => 'Example' );

my $action = lc( $ARGV[0] );   # (start|stop|restart)

$website->$action;

METHODS

Class Methods

new

Creates a new instance of the website object.

Instance Methods

name

The identifier for the website, used as the FastCGI-process title.

base

The base directory of the application, using FindBin.

dev

A simple boolean flag to indicate whether you're running a development instance of the website.

It's on by default, and currently turned off if the base directory contains /live. Feel free to set it based on your own logic before calling start().

I typically use working directories such as /home/user/www.example.com/dev and /home/user/www.example.com/live.

This flag is useful to disable things like Google Analytics on the dev site.

The website object is available to all templates under the name website.

e.g. [% IF website.dev %] ... [% END %]

processes

Number of FastCGI process to spawn, 5 by default.

$website->processes( 10 );

templates

The directory containing the TT templates, by default it's $website->base . '/templates'.

start

Starts the FastCGI daemon. Performs basic checks of your environment and dies if there's a problem.

stop

Stops the FastCGI daemon.

restart

Restarts the FastCGI daemon, with a 1 second delay between stopping and starting.

CONFIGURATION

The app should be a simple Perl script in a folder with the following structure:

app.pl         # see the synopsis
website.json   # see below
website.pid    # generated, to allow stopping of the process
website.sock   # generated, to accept incoming FastCGI connections
    /logs
    /templates
        404.tt

The config file is read for each and every request, this makes adding new pages easy, without the need to restart the application.

Currently only JSON is supported for the config file, named website.json. This should be placed in the base directory of your website.

See the examples directory for a sample JSON config file, something like the following...

{
   "pages" : [
      {
         "path" : "/",
         "template":"index.tt",
         ...
      },
      ...
   ]
   ...
   "send_alerts_from":"The Example Website <no-reply@example.com>",
   "send_404_alerts_to":"you@example.com",
   ...
}

The entire config hash is available in all templates via [% config %], there are only a couple of mandatory/reserved attributes.

The mandatory field in the config is pages, which is an array of JSON objects.

Each page object should contain a path (for URL matching) and template to render.

All other fields are completely up to you, to fit your requirements.

When a request is made, a lookup is performed for a page by matching the path, which then results in rendering the associated template.

If no page is found, the template 404.tt will be rendered, make sure you have this file ready in the templates directory.

The page object is available in the rendered template, eg, [% page.path %]

It is often useful to have sub-pages and categories, etc. Simply create a pages attribute in a page object as another array of page objects.

If a sub-page is matched and selected for a request, an extra key for parents is included in the page object as a list of the parent pages, this is useful for building breadcrumb links.

TODO

More documentation.

Deep recursion for page/path lookups.

Deep recursion for sitemap.

Cleanup deeper recursion in pages with parents.

Searching, somehow, of some set of templates.

Include filename of config file in website/self object?

Include content of config in website/self object? Reload on change to be really snazzy.

AUTHOR

Rob Brown, <rob at intelcompute.com>

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to bug-lavoco-website at rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Lavoco-Website. I will be notified, and then you will automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.

SUPPORT

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

perldoc Lavoco::Website

You can also look for information at:

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2014 Rob Brown.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; or the Artistic License.

See http://dev.perl.org/licenses/ for more information.