PerlPress

PerlPress is a static web content management system written in the programming language Perl. It can be used to build up a blog-style website that consists of static files. PerlPress is currently in an early development stage.

Installation

PerlPress is developed using Dist::Zilla. After cloning the repository make sure you have Dist::Zilla installed and configured. Change to the directory PerlPress/ (here you should find a file named dist.ini) and run dzil install (you may become sudo first). Assuming the installation process ran successfully, you have all libraries and executables in place.

Each PerlPress project has a source directory holding the HTML template and other stuff. The article content is stored in a SQLite database. Therefore, you have to ensure, SQLite is installed.

Setting up your project

The directory PerlPress/example holds example files. With these files you can set up a minimal project to play with or use them as a starting point for your own project.

What you need to set up the example project:

• Create a directory PerlPress/ in your home directory, e.g.: mkdir ~/PerlPress/.
• Copy the sub directory example from the local PerlPress repository into ~/PerlPress/, e.g.: cp example/ ~/PerlPress/..
• Copy the file ~/PerlPress/example/perlpress.conf to ~/.perlpress.conf in your home directory.
• Edit ~/.perlpress.conf to suit your needs. If you have choosen other directories, change accordingly.

Now, you are finished! You have a complete little example project defined.

Start PerlPress

To start PerlPress simply type perlpress to the command line. You should see the PerlPress prompt.

First, open a project by typing open [project]. Replace "project" by the name of the project definition in the config file ~/.perlpress.conf. For the predefined example project "example" the command would be open example.

After successful database connection the PerlPress prompt changed an indicates the connection by an asterisk between the brackets.

Now you can show a list of articles defined. Therefore, type in list articles.

You can edit an existing article. You choose the article by it's article ID ("Art ID" in the list). Type in edit article [id] and replace id with the id of the article you wish to edit.

You can also add new articles. Simply type in new article and follow the instructions. You will end up in an editor with a skeleton of all the article information. Never change the structure of that file! The default editor is GNU nano. You can change the editor in the system section of ~/.perlpress.conf. In nano you can end editing by typing Ctrl+x. After editing, check your article is listed properly in the article list by again typing list article.

Finally you can compile the website by typing make. The files are put in a sub directory in the output file (refer to ~/.perlpress.conf). The sub directory's name format is YYYYDDMM-HHMMSS/.

Other useful commands:

• rm article [id] - Delete an article entirely from the database. Alternatively you can unpublish an article by editing the article and change the appropriate parameter.
• list categories - List all categories defined
• list tags - List all tags defined
• rm (category|tag) [id] - Delete a category or tag, respectively.
• new (category|tag) [id] - Cretae a new category or tag, respectively.
• close - Close project. After that, you can reconnect to a project.
• quit - Quit PerlPress.