Web Publishing with Perl Objects

Reinhard Voglmaier

The Internet has grown exponentially in the past ten years, and along with technical improvements have come changes to the way we work. First, a few people may have worked on a whole Web site, but now sometimes a whole team of Web editors may work on only a little part of an enterprise portal.

A standard life cycle for Web pages has evolved in our company. Web pages initially live only on a developer’s desktop and are eventually added to a test site. After the updated pages are approved, they’re put into production and the whole site is then in a constant state of change. This cycle of Web page development — from test to production — continues as long as the site is on the Internet.

In our environment, many Web editors produce material for our Web sites, and it would be unwise to give them all full access to our Apache servers. Furthermore, our internal review process for Web pages requires an official (a publisher) to approve every page before it goes online. The sheer volume of material flowing to the site requires some degree of automation so that the few full-access Web managers do not have to manually post every new page.

We have developed the following system to help meet the requirements of our process:

1. Web editors post their completed pages to a test Web site.

2. Supervisory Web publishers review and edit the completed pages at the test site. When the page meets the publisher’s approval, he or she executes a script that places the page in the queue for the next production update.

3. An automated script with full access to the Apache environment posts the approved pages to a production Web server at regular intervals.

I described this environment in a previous article (“Simplifying Web Production”, Sys Admin magazine, May 2000: