Experimenting with Tinderbox XML

After I sucessfully imported some parts of my old weblog I reconsidered the idea to publish with Tinderbox to a database instead of using it to render HTML. Here is the current idea:

• A Python script will read the Tinderbox file and publish this into a MySQL database
• The database will be synchronized with a copy on the server
• The server uses Zope to publish content (but can use anything that works with MySQL)
• Server will use meta data, link data and possibly other things to create the site

Some advantages:

• No need for agents anymore, the searching/collecting is done entirely on the server
• No need for export and rendering from Tinderbox
• A wider range of possibilities when translating data to HTML (full scripting)
• Agents and HTML export is still possible – e.g. to keep a “internal work site”
• Can possibly be extended to work for other environments
• Possibly opens a way to use other ways of translating ASCII text to HTML (e.g. ReStructuredText or Textile)
• Could allow many authors to contribute to one site (but not edit content created by others)

Some disadvantages:

• Obviously there is code needed
• Needs Python and MySQL on the client and MySQL on the server
• Concept for a database structure and content specifications needed (how to use actually information from the Tinderbox file in the site)
• A great deal of development needed on the server to turn the database into a site
• Changing the Tinderbox file a lot could break the system
• It is a one-way process – so no edits on the server travel back to Tinderbox

I investigated PyXML and elementtree which I found via Uche Ogbujis article on XML.com. I also found this XML & Python tutorial by Alexandre Fyolle very helpful. This Devshed tutorial on MySQL & Python reminded me about how to connect to the database. All this worked pretty well in first experiments.

The translation script will have to do some heavy work:

• Translate Tinderbox commands (or invent own)
• Maybe convert links and styles
• manage images that are inside the Tinderbox file