gauss moving and would need some updates along the way

[Carsten Svaneborg]

On Wednesday 08 November 2006 11:50, you wrote:
> Can you tell me what kinds of APIs you would need to host Gauss on
> something like wikidot?

I don't have time to look into what wikidot offers. (or to do anything for
Gauss for the forseeable future)

But Gauss is a MoinMoin based site, where certain "wiki namespaces"
are handled by a set of python script plugins rather than moinmoin
own code.

One example is http://gauss.ffii.org/PatentView/EP747840

PatentView defines a namespace, EP747840 is an argument that
the corresponding python script recives. It then calls the postgresql
DB to get patent info, and generates a patent layout in moinmoin markup.

Moinmoin then converts this to html and sends it to the browser. This
has the advantage that the moinmoin theme applies equally to
the scripted namespaces. And the namespaces are defined by
regexes so it is very flexible.

The major unsolved disadvantage is that the moinmoin search engine
is unaware of the namespaces, hence you can't search for instance
patent texts.

A technical issue is that we need to dial in to the database every time
a page has to be generated. As far as I know, there is not currently
a persistent pool of DB connections shared between the scripts.

A second technical problem is that the scripts generate something
irregardless what arguments they receive. This could be an error
message, or a content permanently redirected message. Which means
that we had to modify the twisted webserver, to return the correct HTTP
error codes such that search engines does not index error messages.
But I think this should mostly work now.

-- 
  Mvh. Carsten