[Templates] Design question

18:58 on 28 Jun 2004

I'm using the TT as the base of an ecommerce system that is
specifically for subscription membership sites.  I have a permission
system based on users and groups that is close to the standard unix
user/group system.  Basically you have a file tree of template files. 
All the files within the tree inherit the group of the their parent,
unless specifically put into their own group.  So for example I can
put a directory into a group, and all the files underneath that
directory will automatically be in that group.

Now I want to add another layer on top of this.  What I want is to
have optional views of a file based on the group it is in.  So for
example an unauthorized user (group public)  would see one version of
members.html, but a paid subscriber in the group 'members' would see a
different version.  And another user in a group 'premium_members'
could see yet another version, and so on..

One way I was thinking of is that in each directory, you would have
subdirectories for each group.  Such as _public, _members, etc..  This
would make some things simpler, but might make management more
difficult and less intuitive.  Changing the group of a file would
require moving that file, and adding/deleting groups would require
adding/deleting directories on the server.

Or, I could just name the files with a suffix or prefix that contains
the group.  For example index.html for public, members_index.html if
it belongs to the 'members' group, etc..

Also, a prerequisite is that template files can also be just plain
html files, no directives should be necessary.  One reason why I was
thinking about the above solution is that in some ways it would be a
lot easier for end users who only know html.  They can add code to the
pages if they want, but they aren't forced into using page templates
that have embedded code to accomplish the authorization.

On another note, does anyone know of open source project hosting that
supports mod perl, TT, and postgresql?

Chris

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