Seth has been expecting a thread about integrating RU with C ever since I posted a comment about how cool this would be. This is not that post (entirely) but it does contain the germ of an idea that struck me as I was invigilating one of my exams this morning. I'm quite excited by the idea, how about those of you that may be following the RU developments?

Create an alternative view of any page by using an alternative view access mechanism that really does little more than use a different template when generating the page.

In the context of Radio Userland here is how I envisage it working: URL something like www.free-conversant.con/smeed/ruview/...

The ruview path renders the given page using an RU outline template. The RU outline template populates an outline page in RU's XML format [see http://radio.userland.com/backend.html]. RU will interpret the transmitted page like a normal RU outline document.

The advantage this has over the current RU/Manila scheme of just repackaging the contents of a raw table/outline is that the editor of the site has control over, for example, the order/nesting of the outline that gets sent to the RU client. For example, you could change the thread view of a discussion group - in fact, have the thread views as options on RUs right-click menu. Threading in DG messages has already been requested as an enhancement by the current RU community.

IMHO, one of the major strengths of Conversant is it's flexibility built around templates. Unless I am overlooking something obvious it seems to me that Conversant is much better equipped than Manila in this regard. In fact I might just try this idea out by creating a special template but presumably will have problems when it comes to delivering it as a .xml file. So perhaps Seth at al can give some thought to supporting the text/XML mime type.

Of course, RC would still need XML-RPC hooks to be able to accept modified outlines and deposit them back into the Conversant/Frontier ODB. But I'll leave that for another message.

More later...

Cheers,

Duncan