OpenSpice
Construction of this website was made extremely interesting by the design and engineering criteria.
OpenSpice is the open specification activity for the Spice programming language and the OpenSpice Group is the team of people involved in developing the open specification. The team required write-access to a centrally-maintained document set.
One of the most popular ways of achieving this is to install a wiki on the server and allow the wiki to handle the documents using the built-in wiki document set organising principles.
However, wikis are generally designed to afford write-access to all registered users, it is a standard wiki principle. We needed to restrict authorship of the main documents to the OpenSpice team, we judged that the built-in wiki comment facility would be adequate to allow open commentary on the main documents without jeopardising their integrity.
Fortunately MoinMoin, a Python-implemented wiki, departed from the wiki tenets sufficiently
to provide an access control system suitable for our modest requirements.
With a small amount of tweaking of the server configuration and the addition of an HTML renderer to the available wiki actions, the website pages themselves could be authored within the wiki and served from the wiki via the Apache include module and SSI
The end result is illustrated in the two screenshots. The upper-left screenshot shows the server-parsed HTML output as rendered in a browser and the other screenshot shows the document as stored in the wiki, conveniently editable using the built-in wiki editing facilites and wiki markup.
MoinMoin is even used to store and edit the SSI header and footer, both retrieved from the wiki by the server as HTML and spliced seamlessly into the rendering.
By using this technique, web pages become usefully concise, this is the unparsed HTML content of the "About Us" page:
<html> <head> <title>About the Open Spice Group</title> </head> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/website.css"/> <body> <!--#include virtual="/docs/moin.cgi/Website_2fNavBar?action=raw"--> <!--#include virtual="/docs/moin.cgi/Website_2fAboutUsText?action=format&mimetype=text/html"--> <!--#include virtual="/docs/moin.cgi/Website_2fFooter?action=raw"--> </body> </html>