I remember a thing I played with a little way back.. perlhoo (perl based yahoo-style directory). Though I don't specifically recommend using it.

Actually I've made a couple of these, a relatively simple one which I added to a mod_perl app and one now which is a bit bigger but unfortunately am forced to do in PHP with a preset structure - acckkk! as bill the cat would say. Also PHP is evil. Thank you.

If you use mod_perl you are probably doing it for speed. But this may be overkill and you will need to use strict and get used to watching the apache error_log. Getting into Apache is useful though, for example you could use the mod_rewrite apache module to perhaps make it look like the pages are indeed static.

Perhaps it would be useful to first get realistic page mockups done of each representative "screen" in html or as a bitmap image so you can get the full feature list through discussions with your client. Then as far as technology goes why not try and abstract out the storage mechanism and focus on the logical (algorithmic) design. It could be useful also to make a "web service" (mod_perl might be good..) which answers queries about the directory because then the directory could be more useable for other things in the future (i.e. maybe you would publish new items in an rdf feed). Of course you may not want to get into this yet but you can plan for it.

Sure mysql is probably a great idea but I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about the storage method now, instead you need to know the whole feature set and also work out the logical design you will use for representing your data. I would recommend making every item an object that for example knows its url, description, creator, parent, category, etc. Recently I had good luck with Mysql and Class::DBI in another project, you might enjoy that and it makes it relatively easy to use an OO interface to your database.


In reply to Re: Creating a Directory Site by mattr
in thread Creating a Directory Site by CodeJunkie

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.