New Message: Re: Serving a single file

[webmaster at userland.com]

A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$1607

By: David Bayly (dbayly at udena.ch)

ACtually the answer to this is easy. In your example site, go to the table that contains the website probably mySiteManilawebsite. Add a new entry called myfile.xml with a value the string of the contents of file you wnat to serve, and set binary type to xml. Now Frontier will serve that url with the mimetype mapped from the binary type .

Of course this begs at least 2 questions.

* How do you get the entry added without fooling around on the console? One nnswer : a simple plugin can do this. There are complications making sure you don't overwrite a Manila critical url etc., but its pretty easy.
* What happens when you want to serve a 1GB movie this way? Answer Frontier probably dies when you add a 1GB entry to a root , and even if that works you never get a sucessful download because Frontier webserver is not designed to do that type of serving.

Overall, having "static" files in the root doesn't make a lot of sense, which likely explains where GEM come from. I seem to recall that Jake added something to site structure that allows putting a redirect into the site structure by specifying a url; so when you hit myfile.xml; Manila auto redirects to the static file served by Apache or from another server is delivered. Makes sense to me.

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