New Message: Re: Serving content with Manila

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A new message was posted:

Address: http://frontier.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$8875

By: Michael Risch (mrisch at computerlaw.com)

Thanks for the response. Here is the background, which you can skip if you want - the meat is below. I have answered some of the basic questions myself, but still need a little help, described below.

We have been testing and working with Manila since Manila-Palooza (what is that, like 2 years now?). I learned a lot, still have a lot to learn, wrote some stuff, tweaked it a lot (like doing multiple sites with isp.root even before it was available in Manila), but at bottom we could not deploy it as our intranet/extranet because of some security and easy of use issues we had for other things we wanted to do. I am sure Manila does all that we want, but I think the development cost would be higher than we want.

In steps Novell Portal Services, for which I am both a beta tester and a developer support person. It does all of the things I want, with a much easier admin interface for integrating certain things, and it ties easily to our email and document management system via gadgets.

NOW, what it doesn't have is content management. No easy place to create and store stories. It has an RSS news client gadget. It has an XML gadget (and you write a stylesheet to show the XML formatted). It does not have a built in content submission and publishing system.

On the phone with the developers, I kept saying "Have you looked at Manila? I want something like that built in." Then I had a brainstorm - why not just use Manila to do that work?

Now, to the meat of the problem.

I am going to be able to link the HTML gadget to news stories and do RSS clients. BUT I need to get content into Manila (and allow others to do so).

SO I set up an HTML Gadget which points to www.mysite.com/ManilaSite/News/edit... (don't remember the URL, but you get the idea- it is the add a news story page).

I also used David Carter-Tod's ldap.root scripts to enable LDAP authentication to our Novell eDirectory (what a neat solution, I am quite impressed).

Here are our main concerns now:
1. I need a way to force authentication for ANY web view, so that I can control access to all pages. What do I do, but a #members in the root?
2. I need a way to pass authentication information to Manila THE FIRST TIME. Right now, I pass the information when the login page opens (instead of the addastory page), and I even send a post. However, redirection fails. If I hit refresh, I get an editor toolbar at the top, as the cookie has now been set. Is there a way to pass information so that the redirect will work properly?

I hope this clears things up a bit. Thanks for any help, I appreciate it. I think this will be a great solution when completed.

This is a Manila site.. http://manila.userland.com/.