Hydra: Multiple Faces for Collaborative Content

Hydra: Multiple Faces for Collaborative Content

By Kirsten Hunter
Date: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 10:20 AM
Duration: 50 minutes
Language:

Social applications like wikis are great for encouraging collaboration,
lowering barriers to entry, and allowing both technical and
non-technical people to work together to generate content -- but
they're not always the best way to *present* that content. People often
want to use a wiki to create and maintain information, but then deliver
it some other way, outside of the original wiki environment.

The Perl Foundation website provides a good example of this. It's
recently been recreated using a lightweight web framework over a
Socialtext wiki, connected via a REST interface. This combination of
freely available Perl-based tools allows authors to edit the content
and appearance of the website via the wiki, but deliver the content in
a variety of different views (including the original "Web 0.9" look of
the original site).

In this presentation, I'll demonstrate that the same information is
visible:
* In the original wiki workspace (and discuss the use of tags to
organize the website content)
* On the Perl Foundation website
* In a "blog view" of the "News" category

I'll also cover the building blocks that make Hydra possible, including:
* The Perl modules needed for display (and the logic therein)
* The templates that control the appearance of the site
* The configuration information contained in the wiki
* The REST interface that ties everything together