[ILUG] Info Search testers.. ILUG list frontend.

[Donncha O Caoimh]

I'm working on a frontend to the ILUG list at home at the moment and
looking for people to throw things at it and test. As it's my home
machine I don't want to give out the URL here but if anyone is
interested, please mail me at donncha at linux.ie and I'll get back to you
with the URL after about 7pm tonight. Also, since it's a dev machine,
chances are things will change as you use them, but hopefully won't be
too broken.

The frontend is actually a simplified webforum, there are high level
categories such as "Email", "Web", "X", which break down to sendmail,
fetchmail, procmail, apache, fonts..
Each of these holds related messages. Each message contains a link to a
webpage, a note, and details about who submitted the message. 
When the message is viewed the URL is fetched and pasted into the
browser. Yes, there are huge legal reprecussions doing this. If we were
to embed a foreign site in the page we could be accused of
"deep-linking" and sued etc. Only local pages (www.linux.ie) will be
allowed.
I've offered the facility of entering a short note (<256 chars) so a URL
can be posted in the note and a description given of it.
All messages have to be cleared by an admin, whose name is stored with
the message so if anything does come up there's a clear paper trail
back. 
At the moment the message (url/note) cannot be edited through the
interface but that's an easy part.

Features:
Simple navigation without frames, works well in Lynx, and on the 9110.
Categorised information, making it easy to find things. 
User contributed information - relevant and useful, hopefully!
Admin can create categories and sub-categories (called Subjects here)
through the web interface.
Admin can verify that a message is ok to post. It won't appear until
then. An admin can also delete the message. The message is still in the
database, only the status is changed.
If the person who submitted the message enters an email address they'll
be emailed when an admin accepts/rejects the submition. Admins are
emailed when there's a new message.
Email/Name can be stored in a cookie so that when you next submit a
message it's filled in the relevant fields (like Linuxtoday.com)
(broken, change your name/email and the cookie is updated but the
browser still picks the old values..)

TODO:
edit message (by admin)
An "Add this message" link at the end of each message in the web
archive..
more...

Donncha.