Thank you.

If you are doing purely HTML template stuff, I think you’ll find XSL pretty much comparable to PHP in terms of difficulty (but a lot more verbose). But, in reality, you aren’t likely to be doing the same things. XSL is a closed language — there are only a certain number of types of things you can do with it. You won’t be running database queries from inside XSL, for instance. You won’t be dealing with session variables from inside XSL. You won’t be doing any of the things that makes PHP both flexible and more involved. You’ll essentially be translating from whatever the engine handed you into whatever you want it to look like, and nothing else.

PHP, OTOH, will allow you to do additional stuff. If the data you are given isn’t quite what you want, you can change it, or recreate it, or do all sorts of things the PHP and WordPress environment allow you to do. That’s where you’ll find the big difference between the two languages for templating.

One last thing — when looking over the Symphony FAQ yesterday, I found this at the bottom:

“That said, Symphony is unmistakably designed for developers. [...] If you’re looking for an application that takes care of the technical side of things for you, then Symphony is probably not the best choice.”

It looks to me that, unless Symphony already does *exactly* what you need in terms of collection and creation of data — so that all you need to do is translate what it hands you into pretty HTML — you are going to be learning XSL *and* PHP, and you’ll be writing the hard kind of PHP to get it to do what you need. I can’t say that for sure, not having used it, but that’s the way it sounds to me. In which case, given what you’ve said, I’d advise you to go with WordPress — there are an *awful* lot of plugins out there that can probably do all of the hard stuff for you, leaving you with relatively simple templating jobs to do in PHP.

Chris.

lt xsl:if test=”@attr” gt lt xsl:value-of select=”@attr” / gt lt / xsl:if gt

lt xsl:if gt lt xsl:value-of select=”@attr” / gt lt / xsl:if gt

I haven’t used Symphony, so I can’t really comment. The website for it certainly looks like the people writing it care about making it good, so it might indeed be great.

But you should be clear: XSL is still programming — only the “names” are different from what you’d do in your average PHP template. Instead of writing a “for” loop and printing variables at various places in an otherwise HTML file, you write an XSL stylesheet that contains various XSL templates that are executed when a certain structure is matched in the working data, that select nodes from the source XML and expand elements into a new XML structure (XHTML, for instance).

Or, to be a bit less obtuse, instead of writing something like “if( $var ) { echo $var; }”, you’d write something like “”. Mostly what you’ll notice different is that the XSL will take a *lot* more typing to do the same thing.

That said, if you are working with tree-structured data as a source, XSL will end up being *way* easier than walking trees in PHP (I generate my CV in various formats from an XML file and XSL, for instance). But I’m not sure I hear any significant tree-structured data in what you’re talking about. It sounds more like you are doing a basic database-backed portal, and that’s what WordPress is good at. And it also sounds like you have a couple of PHP types already interested, so I think you’ll be well served.

In the end, though, you need to be happy with the site and how it works. If you’d like an excuse to learn XSL, and this was to be it, then don’t let me discourage you, by any means. Download Symphony and give it a shot. I’m curious enough about it to pitch in, if you want. This is your hobby (I presume), so it should make you happy. :-) OTOH, if you were just looking for a quick and easy solution, you should at least have a look at WordPress and what plugins are available for it. You’ll probably be able to get something up in running in much less time (ie. less than a week).

Regards . . . .

I run Sarah’s website for her, and she told me she was thinking of joining up with your project, so I thought I’d look around. Having read the thread, I thought I’d toss in my 2 cents on the technical end. By way of background, I’ve written systems in PHP, Rails, XSL, and a variety of other technologies, and have worked with WordPress and Drupal.

My feeling is that you’ll be hard-pressed to beat WordPress for flexibility and work-effort to get stuff done. It rocks. And it’s built to be modified, so you can do just about anything with it, often for very little work — especially if you can find a plugin to start from (which is very likely). It also reliably installs and upgrades with zero effort, which is definitely a big feature.

My personal experience with Rails is that the MVC stuff eventually gets in your way, as it can lead to a problem of too many trees and not enough forest. Not to mention the fact the you can’t actually separate View and Controller in web stuff, leading to a lot of messy bookkeeping. Finally, and most unfortunately, the Rails developers keep the API a moving target, which means you may end up having to rewrite anything that isn’t really simple, every time you upgrade the system. This has been a particular problem for me with the routing system, which translates between URLs and the Ruby code that handles it. Finding a host that will allow you to avoid that (by locking the Rails version) may prove expensive — a lot of the cheap hosts insist on upgrading Rails every release.

Anyway, there’s my 2 cents. Best of luck with your project!

Chris.

Also, I vouch for Sarah too! (she gave me a good, and comprehensive review after all. And gives me a kick in the pants every now and then too.)

I’ve been doing some reading these past couple days about your idea for a filtering website. It sounds like a promising idea to reach out to those who don’t want to comb through everything that’s listed on Pages Unbound or who are leery of the popular voting system which results in the Hottest Story list.

While limiting who gets to decide on which blooks are included is a fundamental part of this idea — I do think it’s important to have a good sized panel with diverse taste — so that you’re highlighting good quality blooks but not just falling into one or two people focusing on stories which appeal to their personal tastes. I think that would be too far to the other end of the spectrum from PU (where anyone can sign up and review a story which makes it pretty easy to get friends to shower your story with 10s.)

I’m still a little fuzzy on what you mean by editors (possibly because I haven’t read all the comment threads in their entirety) but one of the nice aspects of self publishing online is having complete control over your own work. Personally I would find trying to edit other people’s webnovels to be a daunting and unappealing task (and that’s assuming that authors would be willing to submit to this in order to have their sites listed). But I am interested in the prospect of voting on or contributing to discussions with other “panel members” about which sites to include.

As a first time commenter on Novelr I’m probably eliciting a “who the bleep is this?” reaction — I’m fairly active on the Pages Unbound forum though if you want to check up on me. ;)

Basically, I’d say your major choice is configurability (Symphony, RoR or other frameworks) vs. stuff with piles of pre-written plugins (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal…) that may or may not do exactly what you want.

In my experience, taking the stuff with the plugins is almost always easier (and faster)–up to the point at which you start doing major modifications.

Thus you’ll have to consider whether available stuff is close enough and you just want to get it done or whether it isn’t and you want to write your own (which is more fun…).

I was actually thinking of using Symphony, because XSLT is supposed to be a lot easier to learn for someone (me) who’s already competent in XML and CSS. Do you think it’ll be easier to work with?

PS: righto, changed the link for Legion of Nothing.

@Gavin: thanks. I’ll be getting back to you soon. And yes, reviews are imminent once I’ve finished reading these blooks.

@Nitshke: Thanks. I’ll be in touch.

@Stormy: looks like I got down to reading at the right time, then! =)

@Windvein: Your help would be much appreciated.