NiftyPortal 1.0b17 review
DownloadNiftyPortal is a hierarchical dynamic site construction framework designed for sites (and series of sites) with similar functionality, but widely different designs or looks and feels.
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NiftyPortal is a hierarchical dynamic site construction framework designed for sites (and series of sites) with similar functionality, but widely different designs or looks and feels. The term "similar" is relative; measure is made for overrides of "standard" functionality so that other sites at the same installation can have different code running for different purposes.
NiftyPortal is designed to securely factor reused code among as many different sites as possible. It uses a combination of SpeedyCGI (available on CPAN) and Template Toolkit (also on CPAN) to achieve fast response times, while still maintaining a great deal of flexibility for all maintainers.
You might find NiftyPortal useful if you:
• find yourself creating complex systems of CGI scripts to run your site, and worry more and more about factoring code that's re-used,
• like some of PHP's features, but have a large amount of Perl code you need to maintain,
• have out-grown SSI,
• are creating a large number of sites that need to share code in the back end (such as for a common authentication routine),
• are creating "branded" sites with similar functionality, but different templates or design, along with the ability to override specific templates as necessary,
• need to integrate other Perl code into your site easily and effectively (you're hacking pre-existing forum software),
• think SlashCode is too large, complex, or slow,
• you've rolled your own quasi-templating system, but now need more flexibility,
• can't use mod_perl, or just prefer not to operate within its restrictions
• have used Template Toolkit before, but want to combine true Perl with it easily and in an organized fashion.
Requirements:
You'll need the following Perl modules installed:
DBI - database module
DBD::mysql - database driver
CGI::Minimal - for lightweight CGI form processing
CGI::Carp - for nice CGI error messages
CGI::SpeedyCGI - runs perl persistently
Template - the Template Toolkit system
Time::HiRes - used in benchmarking
Digest::MD5 - for password encrpytion
Clone - data manipulation
Config::Tiny - configuration file parsing
HTTP::Lite - a lightweight alternative to LWP
Mail::Sendmail - easy outgoing mail handling
XML::Simple - used by web services
Data::Dumper - for debugging output
CGI::PathInfo - an alternate query parser.
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