Cache Cannon - Search Engine friendly + plus archive tool.

This is a first release beta.

I had hoped to finish it before now, but the past week of vb 2.2.3 > 2.2.3b > 2.2.3c > 2.2.4 means that I have lost nearly all my spare time in upgrading boards and re-applying hacks!!! Thanks vb!

Anyhow... the cache cannon is a simple script that will loop through the database and will, in essence, splurge every post onto the docroot in the form of a static file.

In this first beta the functionality of splurging onto the docroot is intact, as is the control panel interface.

Still to be done is indexing the resultant directory structures (for the search engine spiders to follow) and prettying up the resultant file.

This is released here as a first beta only, and is for developers only to aid it's improvement.

I do aim to finish this within the next fortnight, but in light of my lost time though it wiser to just get it out there for the meantime!

Cheers

David K

PS: Should've stated more clearly it's purpose! It's designed to perform this splurging primarily to aid with sites being indexed by search engines. Because they are static files they can be indexed quicker, and you can tweak the format to enhance the hit rate.

A second purpose of it is as a static archive of your board. It you are going to upgrade... want to start over, or are just spring cleaning and would like to archive posts in a static method outside of the database, then this will also serve you.

Edited for new version on 2002-03-20 21:11 GMT

[Brian]

I installed and changed the chmod from 755 to 777 as I am running php in safe mode. However i get the following error:

Please wait... doing page 1
Dumping to ../archive/11335/8679.htm
error opening file

[MrLister]

any demo maybe?

[Robert9]

yeah, demo would be great!

[buro9]

Yeah, where's the demo!

erm... well give me a chance to finish it and a demo will be up.
Probably be my live site...

As there is no indexer yet, the only demo would be looking at the docroot to see what is produced.

I'm currently working on foxserv at home... once I finish the indexer and move to live I shall make available the indexes as the demo.

Again, at this point this beta is for developers and is not a finished hack by any means... core functionality in place... yet to finish indexer, without the indexer this script is pretty useless (no point in dumping files if there's no links between them as nothing for users or spiders to follow).

Brian, re: the 777 permissions... this will grant read/write/execute permissions... are you sure?

755 is bad enough with the global read/execute, does this not work for you?

i'm not running php safe mode, but i shall investigate precisely the implications of this and will provide a switch to accomodate this in the final version.

for the meantime, any developers wishing to install are recommended to try it at home on foxserv first, and then move to their live environment when happy.

Cheers

David K

[buro9]

Brian,

Had a look at safe mode, it shouldn't affect what we're doing.

The chmod I had left in there merely sets the directory permissions. 0755 directory root (read/write/execute), local(read/execute), global (read/execute).

The files were not affected since they are static, we just need permissions to write the file to the folder.

In the PHP manual there was concern from one user that chmod didn't work whilst in safe mode:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.chmod.php
But I shall find out for sure.

You should not need to change from 0755 for the purpose of creating directories. Some providers will set 0777 as a security flaw and will block writing to the folder (mine does this), so using 0777 may actually prevent it from working.

Does this still happen under 0755?

Let me know.

Cheers

David K

[rawnet]

Can we use this under a Windows2000 environment or is this *nix only?

[buro9]

You should be fine for use in Windows 2000, since that is what I developed it in.

I unfortunately don't have a dedicated *nix box, so I develop using FoxServ on Windows XP or Windows 2000.

Whilst this means I may have to add tweaks once I get it to my redhat shared server, it will mean that it will always work on Windows environments.

Cheers

David K

[jamesdasher]

I'm excited but for a different reason :-) you are saying that this dumps all posts from a dynamic page into a static page?? If so it sounds like it will give me a start on my Palm/AvantGo related thing that I wanted to mess with

James

[buro9]

Indeed, as static files there would be no reason you couldn't zip and download to a palm, or even format as wml... the process would be built for you, you'd just need to create a new template for it's display!

Wait until we finish it though