[Catalyst] Wiki: How To vs. Cookbook, and general change requests

[Mike Raynham]

On 25/03/11 23:46, Mark A. Stratman wrote:
> I've been picking at it here and there, but one of these days soon I'm
> planning to sit down and thoroughly go through my growing todo list for
> the wiki ... namely page cleanups for consistency, clearly marking
> outdated stuff, and perhaps some slight reorganization.
>
> But first I'd like to run this by everyone since it's a fairly large
> change:
> The howto and the cookbook sections of the wiki both seem to be filling
> the same "How do I...?" role
> http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/gettingstarted/howtos
> http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/wikicookbook
>
> Should they remain separate, and if so what should the logical
> distinction between them be? Otherwise, I'd like to roll them into the
> same page (and if so, anyone have opinions on whether it should be "How
> to..." or "Cookbook" ?)
>
> Further, does anyone have anything they'd really like to see happen on
> the wiki but haven't had time to do? Perhaps I can throw it on my plate
> with the rest of this.
>
> --
> Mark
>
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I'm still fairly new to all things Perl and Catalyst (although I'm not 
sure for how long I can continue to say that), and I have been meaning 
to put together some information for the wiki for a while, based on my 
experiences of getting things up and running.  Alas, the passage of time 
keeps getting the better of me.  So, for what it's worth, here are some 
of my thoughts:

There is also some overlap between the cookbook on CPAN and the wiki pages:

http://search.cpan.org/~zarquon/Catalyst-Manual-5.8005/lib/Catalyst/Manual/Cookbook.pod#Deployment

http://wiki.catalystframework.org/wiki/deployment

I think deployment documentation could be improved - although I notice 
that it has been expanded since I last looked.  One of the great things 
about Catalyst is that it can be deployed in a variety of scenarios, 
including shared hosting, static and external FastCGI, and even using 
the built-in server.

I'm happy to supply working copies of my old Apache virtual host files 
and Ubuntu init scripts, together with my shiny new Nginx config files 
and Ubuntu upstart scripts, if that helps to flesh out the existing 
documentation.

I have also been thinking of putting together a series of tutorials, 
from the perspective of a relative newbie, that cover creating a 
Catalyst application from scratch.  The CPAN Catalyst tutorial is great, 
and it allowed me to dive in and start learning Perl and Catalyst, but 
since then, I've learned a lot more.  I'd like to share some of that if 
possible.  My probably overly optimistic idea is to detail the creation 
of a complete application that includes, amongst other things:

* Clean separation of model and controllers
* Catalyst::Action::REST & Catalyst::Request::REST::ForBrowsers
* Separating the application configuration from Catalyst

Some of these ideas are based shamelessly on a couple of Dave Rolsky 
posts that have inspired me:

The "Configuration File (Mis)Handling" section of this post:
http://blog.urth.org/2009/08/how-i-use-catalyst.html

The issues address in this post:
http://blog.urth.org/2009/07/what-is-catalyst-really.html

Creating the foundations of a Catalyst-based blogging application to 
rival Movable Type and Wordpress would be nice... :-)

The obvious caveat is that I am by no means an expert, so my work would 
need to be checked by those who actually know what they are talking 
about...  I also seem to be very busy all of the time, which doesn't help.


Mike