Fwd: Re: [dev] Weather block; need advice/help

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

----- Forwarded message from rick at emery.homelinux.net -----
    Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2004 11:54:57 -0500
    From: Rick Emery <rick at emery.homelinux.net>
Reply-To: Rick Emery <rick at emery.homelinux.net>
 Subject: Re: [dev] Weather block; need advice/help
      To: Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>

This should probably have gone to the dev list; feel free to forward it there if
you agree :-)

Quoting Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>:

> Quoting Rick Emery <rick at emery.homelinux.net>:
>
> > Also, according to the Services_Weather instructions, the server admin is
> > supposed to register for the xml feed at weather.com and will be sent a
> > partner ID and license key (to be used when retrieving the feed). I
registered
> > twice and never received a reply, and Alexander (the author of the
> > Services_Weather package) said it would work with any strings used for those
> > fields.
>
> Huh. We should (quietly) document that somewhere. ;)

I've actually been thinking about this for a little while. I think I was working
on
another applet, and came across something that should be configurable, but by
the
administrator, not the user. This is a perfect example; the server admin just
needs
to register once, to get the partner ID and license key, then can apply those
values to the whole site. Additionally, if there were a conf.php (or conf.xml)
for
the applet, variables for the partner ID and license key could be set without
touching the code, and the need to register could be documented in a comment.

However, horde/config/conf.php doesn't feel like the right place for applet
configuration; it's more of a system-wide configuration file, and we're just
talking about applets. There is a comment about the required registration in
[path-to-pear]/Services/Weather/Weatherdotcom.php, and we could add one to
horde/lib/Block/weatherdotcom.php, but an adminstrator isn't likely to look in
either file. It feels weird to add information in the horde INSTALL instructions
for configuring the applets, but that's another way to go too (maybe under "not
required, but recommended).

Jan mentioned on the dev list that one of the TODO items was to make the applets
self-contained, so that, for example, the weather blocks wouldn't even be
available
to the user if the pear Services_Weather package wasn't installed. I think that
is
an excellent idea, and maybe each applet could have a configuration file too.

I'm really just rambling now, thinking out loud and throwing some ideas out to
see
if they stick.

Thanks,
Rick



----- End forwarded message -----


-chuck

--
Charles Hagenbuch, <chuck at horde.org>
"Here, I brought some cole slaw. It's made from peeeooople! Just kidding."