For those of you playing along at home. Every time I say something like “I don’t know how we did that.” Or, “Real developers worked on that part.” In those cases, I’m probably referring to Kelly. Or Art. Or Tobby.

Especially check out the Search feature on SavannahNow. Kelly wrote that.

I sent Jeremy some code last week that removes the ‘wildcard’ barrier from using the file cache, so we’re talking.

The generator does have two additional intended features that filecache doesn’t. Since the files already exist, it allows site editors (there are 4) to preview changes when moving blocks, promoting stories, et. al.

Then when the editor is happy with the changes, they can ‘publish’ the results. Workflow that supports a ’staging’ server model would be very welcome at the enterprise level.

Second, the generator serves ’static’ pages to all users, not just anonymous users. Since the pages it generates are the most popular on the site, it really made our operations guys happy.

But, that said, I like the fastcache, and we use that as well.

I did that to make sure that the Curl trick would work, and because I wasn’t sure which filesystem checks I needed.

It turned out that the file checks I need are all in file.inc (I think). If more work were going to be done on generator, first it would have to be brought into full Drupal mode. Then there are some code redundancies to remove.

For a site with multiple editors (this site has at least 6), generator has the added benefit of ‘preview’ and ‘backup.’ Since we generate static pages from dynamic, when an editor moves blocks around, she can preview what the changes might look like before output.

Currently, the module supports one level of restore from backup, though the code could easily support N levels. Backups are stored in the filesystem, though the database might be better.

- Ken

Don’t get me wrong, VotingAPI is cool, but I don’t know that I needed it. Three main reasons I didn’t:

1) I only needed one new Voting app, so an API seemed like overkill. See #2…

2) More modules = more code.

3) Honestly, I wanted to write something from scratch so I could see all the moving parts. Learning the Voting API (which I started) would’ve shortcut the learning process.

- Ken

As the author of VotingAPI, my ears perked up when you mentioned not wanting the overhead of that module. Would you be interested in discussing that? Not to ‘convince’ you to use it, but rather to figure out ways the API can be improved. I’d love to chat about ways it can be made lighter without sacrificing too much functionality.