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

Dear Fellow Monks,

This is a little off topic and it is mainly directed to running a site like this and not to perl in general. I ask for some mercy in breeching protocol as well as your opnions on the matter.

I am looking to write a content management system similar to this with forums but aiming much more towards limited content generation and large amounts of archiving of data. ( Think online library ) Amd while I look for some of the possibilities online to fit my needs it really seems to me that a custom app is needed to merge with my existing programs and some of the other stuff coming online this month. But I digress.

When you enter this site a perl script is called that generates the main page and retrieves the content and login information on the user if it is stored. I think this is wonderful and want to do this as well but now here comes the questions.

  • What sort of server power does the Perl Monks site run on?
  • I was told google does not search dynamic pages such as CGI's if this is true how do i get my page eventually listed. I looked on the web and apparently Google is the only game in town powering all four of the major search engines. If Google can't search I cant get people to find my peoples articles and stuff. What does Perl Monks do about this?

    • Replies are listed 'Best First'.
    Re: Site Development Questions
    by jdporter (Paladin) on Dec 18, 2002 at 04:41 UTC
    [reply]
    [d/l]
    Re: Site Development Questions
    by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Dec 18, 2002 at 10:43 UTC

      Of course, even if Google did not search dynamic pages (it does, but only to an extent, to avoid getting lost in "link forests"), you can always use mod_rewrite rules or the PATH_INFO method to make your URLs appear as if they were static. With a rewrite rule, an address that looks like www.foo.com/everything/12345 then really causes the server to load www.foo.com/index.pl?node_id=12345. With the path info approach, the script itself would be called everything and reside in the server's root, and would take the node ID from the extra path part, /12345, rather than a node_id parameter.

      Of course, both methods do require some extra work - self-referrential links generated by the script must then also follow the new format. From what I've seen of the Everything engine so far, this should be relatively easy, even if not entirely effortless.

      Makeshifts last the longest.

    		[reply]
    •Re: Site Development Questions
    by merlyn (Sage) on Dec 18, 2002 at 14:47 UTC
    [reply]

    Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom