Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
Do you know where your variables are?
 
PerlMonks  

Experiences with Metadot?

by neilwatson (Priest)
on Nov 09, 2005 at 15:22 UTC ( [id://507092]=perlquestion: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

neilwatson has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Has anyone used Metadot on a production server? If so, would care to share your experiences. At first glance it seems like a good application. There are few mentions on Bugtraq indicating that its security may be good, or it's not popular.

If anyone could share their experiences with Metadot I would appreciate it.

Neil Watson
watson-wilson.ca

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Experiences with Metadot?
by fokat (Deacon) on Nov 10, 2005 at 02:13 UTC

    Dear neilwatson

    At $DayJob we evaluated Metadot for a major rewrite of our user-interaction site. It exceeded all of our requirements _except_ being easy to translate/have multilingual sites. While having a content management interface in english is not important to us, the elements you place in the pages are (or were, at the time of the evaluation) not available in spanish.

    IMHO, it's not trivial to add i18n as it is. Other than that, performance can be on par with other alternatives based on dynamic pages, depending of course on how many gizmos you put in your pages.

    We ended up basing our site in http://www.template-toolkit.org and writing a few Template::Plugin modules (which we will place in the public domain once the rewrite is complete and the code is tested in production).

    <plug class="PerlPlug">Please stay away from PHP based CMSes!!! - They're evil and chances are that they will become incompatible with newer releases of PHP.</plug>

    Best regards

    -lem, but some call me fokat

      We are using Metadot and actually having a problem with it.

      In October, we did a multiple upgrade -- to RH Enterprise, to Apache 2.0, to Plesk Reloaded control panel (from Ensim), to Persistent Perl, and to the latest version of Metadot. Something broke the file upload capability in the software.

      In our investigation we suspect something going on with the handling of the POST of the form that does the upload. Seems that the server times out. The form does not appear to be malformed.

      I am actually willing to retain a Perl guru to help us figure out what's going on, so if you're interested, email headguy (at) thewimaxguys.com. We also need someone to help develop and maintain the code in the long run.

      Sorry if this is inappropriate in this forum. I'm a n00b here. But I would appreciate any pointers to info or people who can help. And, yes, I've posted on the Metadot forum to no avail.

      Thanks for any ideas.

      Mike Ellsworth

      We have a similar issue in relation to Metadot and i18n but I think it is possible to get round it.


      Mad implimentation suggestion follows

      The plan is to allow the user to add various language specific information by rapping it in xml tags and then modifying the display to strip out the non required content on the fly. i.e. <locale lang='en'>English Text</locale>

      This is a partial solution and means that in the medium term the content editing side need not be updated significantly. We will probably add that at a later stage but this would require all gizmos to be updated to handle a translation feature which would take time.

      We also want to add language dependant templates but this is probably best done by playing with the path to the skins on the fly. Again relatively straight forward.

      There are some bits that look like Metadot considered adding i18n but never followed through. Talked to their sales people but they did not seem that interested. Their suggestions were to run either multiple sites with a different skin for each or create multiple sections in the site one for each language.

      Both of these require significant user overhead to maintain and make it impossible to create reporting tools that would show article language coverage.

      They did mention that they had once done a custom multilingual version for a customer but it used multiple copies of the user entry fields and they have never kept it upto date. Wanted to do some development for us but as we are a perl shop already using LAMP and template toolkit it seemed a bit excessive.

      We will initially be implimenting a bilingual site but plan in increase this in future.

      UnderMine

Re: Experiences with Metadot?
by punkish (Priest) on Nov 09, 2005 at 16:02 UTC
    sorry, no personal experience with it, but Metadot does seem like a neat application, and a possible alternative for a commercial solution like MS-Sharepoint. I too would be interested in hearing from others of their experience with it.
    --

    when small people start casting long shadows, it is time to go to bed

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: perlquestion [id://507092]
Approved by saberworks
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others cooling their heels in the Monastery: (4)
As of 2024-03-29 11:48 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found