FrontPage PageFilters / backlinks

Filters Proposal

Contact: Joshua Brauer (joshua.brauer@colostate.edu)... This is a very preliminary proposal and needs much work to become a working/usable proposal

In the old days Frontier had a nice way of handling pages called filters. The filters consist of two sets of hooks, which can in turn run scripts that are run before a page or item is processed, after it is processed and a final filter that is run over the entire page just before it is sent out through the webserver. I used the final filter most to do things such as replace server names so that images could be easily set on a second server and the text > IMG Src=/ could universally be replaced with > IMG Src=http://imageserver.whatever . This also provides a nice place to clean out all comments and compress pages to their minimal size.

The names of the filters are inheritable properties so filters can be changed at an item or tree level of page.

Filters would also be nice to have with ZopeTemplateLanguage implementation as they could be run before or after each template is run with hooks

Questions: Filters would run on DTML Documents.... Would they run on any other items? If so how would it be set so filters aren't.

Advantages: A flexible framework that allows filters to be called before a page is sent allows for easy modification of all pages as they are rendered to the end user

Allows for "glossary" items and processing of blocks of text.

Disadvantages Performance hit?

Deliverables

Extension of Zope core or a seperate add-in product