WebApplicationFilter: Help me build an open-source outline renderer in PHP.
Currently it is a practice among some people (me included) to build
distributed directories using
OPML. Thanks to the profusion of tools available to create OPML, it's relatively easy to contribute to these distributed directories, but hard to render them up. Currently, there are some good methods for doing so in JavaScript -
Grazr and
Optimal - but there isn't a very easy way of doing so on the server side. Except, of course, the tools available in the UserLand Frontier environment, but that's not something I want to battle with (and neither, I suspect, do many other people). JavaScript is fine, but I would like to be able to view things on my mobile device.
I'd like to build one, but it seems a pretty mammoth task to me. Basically, I'm thinking that I could build this in PHP 5 - but I'm not totally sure where to start. Should I use the DOM extension? SimpleXML? XSLT? I've used all three, but I'm not sure which would be best for this project (and, I admit - as a fairly newbie developer, I can't quite see the forest for the trees at the moment). I'm capable enough to pull stuff out of the OPML file, but it's getting it to follow the links through to the relevant file that gets me stuck.
The way that OPML distributed directories work is that you might have a directory tree, and a particular branch of that is handled in a completely separate document - and gets "included" when you render the document up.
Ideally, I should be able to set it up so that a person can visit whatever.com/directory/Foo/Bar (with Foo/Bar being branches on the tree). It would be helpful if it could be implemented in such a way that it can be run on the hosting account of anyone who's got PHP installed - but Cache_Lite would also be useful to have.
The way this is currently implemented in Frontier is through the functions listed in these two files:
walk and
viewpage (the language resource for UserTalk is
here. A working example of this code in action is
here).
If this is going to be a lot of work, do you think it would be possible to formulate the instructions above in to a form suitable to hire out to someone on a site like
oDesk or
Rent-a-Coder?
Also, any code that I produce (or commission) will be released under the GPL. Any output that it produces will also be good web standards XHTML as well (I hope) and may also use microformats where appropriate.
I have placed this up
on my blog also, so non-MeFites can comment.
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If this is going to be a lot of work, do you think it would be possible to formulate the instructions above in to a form suitable to hire out to someone on a site like oDesk or Rent-a-Coder?
MeFi Jobs?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:24 AM on November 3, 2006