OS Reviews CMS 20100504

OS Reviews CMS is a content management system that features the generation of purely static content.

OS Reviews CMS also has an NNTP-based comment system, LaTeX input, and customizable templates.

Here are some key features of "OS Reviews CMS":

- Generation of static content for maximum performance
- Comment system with NNTP back-end
- Input format is LaTeX (perfect for hard copies)
- Customizable templates
- 100% standards-compliant output

Requirements:

- OS Reviews CMS requires Perl, with the additional modules CGI (only comment system), DBI, Net::NNTP, Image::Size, Imager and XML::RSS. An SQL database is required, but does not need to be reachable from the web server. If you want to run the comment system, you need a NNTP-based news server (e.g. INN) as well.

Basic Setup

The Perl script 'make.pl' is the content generation engine. Configuration is done by adjusting the variables near the top of the file. When make.pl is run it creates to whole content in the directory specified by $outdir. From there, you can simply copy the directory tree to the final destination on your web server. Most variables in make.pl should be self-explanatory.

To create the SQL tables use the two scripts in the 'sql' directory. These were written for PostgreSQL but can be easily ported to other databases.

If you do not want to use the comment system, set the $commenthost variable to false. Otherwise, Newsgroups are automatically generated for new articles. You only need to create a newsgroup named $hierarchy.admin, where '$hierarchy' is the name of the top-level hierarchy you are going to use. You may want to configure your news server so that it automatically executes the generated control messages. Currently, OS Reviews CMS requires a rnews program to send the newgroup messages.

The 'comments' file is a CGI script that provides the comment system. Again, configuration is done via Perl variables.

To generate the images for the ratings, run the makeratings.pl script in the images directory. If the netpbm package is installed, images will appear smoother.

Template Customization

The directory 'templates' contains several files that control the basic structure of the generated content. Most files a standard HTML files, but some are just small snippets. The layout is almost exclusively done via the files in the 'css' directory.


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