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:

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