[Bug-gnupedia] How to get contributions (was: just HTML??)

[Hector Facundo Arena]

I've decided that we'll use initially XML to store the contributions of the 
people. The first thing we have to do is a CGI Perl script wich gets all the 
data from an HTML form and converts it to XML.

The basic header should contain:

-Author's name
-Author's email
-Topic of the article
-Date of last modification

I know I'm missing a lot... but those are the most important.

That will be the only method allowed to send articles, at least by now.

Once we have the contribution on our server, we need to see what are we going 
to do with that.... I'm not so sure about using MySQL... (for that, we can 
use something like PHP Nuke!). I think that the whole thing can be mantained 
using Perl scripts for adding articles, searching, converting, making 
releases, etc.

Believe me, this model will let us start fast and, if in the future we decide 
to switch to another system like db it'll be easy to do.

If anyone has good experience on CGI Perl scripts and wants to work on this, 
please contact me.

> To stop any chaos, you could allow people to submit
> XML documents so long as they were written very
> precisely, with the exact fields we specify in the
> normal text submission (on the web site's submission
> form) so a perl script could convert it.
> But there's no way you could allow people to start
> putting in their own customised tags and layout into
> the document. As Hector put it, chaos would rein!
>
> Tom Chance
>