Re: Creating a Directory Site

[mattr]

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.