NAME

WWW::AdventCalendar - a calendar for a month of articles (on the web)

VERSION

version 0.093580

DESCRIPTION

This is a library for producing Advent calendar websites. In other words, it makes four things:

• a page saying "first door opens in X days" until Dec 1

• a calendar page on and after Dec 1

• a page for each day in December with an article

• an Atom feed

This library may be generalized somewhat in the future. Until then, it should work for at least December for every year. It has only been tested for 2009, which may be of limited utility going forward.

OVERVIEW

To build an Advent calendar:

1. create an advent.ini configuration file

2. write articles and put them in a directory

3. schedule advcal to run nightly

advent.ini is easy to produce. Here's the one used for the original RJBS Advent Calendar:

  title  = RJBS Advent Calendar
  year   = 2009
  uri    = http://advent.rjbs.manxome.org/
  editor = Ricardo Signes
  category = Perl
  category = RJBS

  article_dir = rjbs/articles
  share_dir   = share

These should all be self-explanatory. Only category can be provided more than once, and is used for the category listing in the Atom feed.

These settings all correspond to "ATTRIBUTES" in calendar attributes described below.

Articles are easy, too. They're just files in the article_dir. They begin with an email-like set of headers, followed by a body written in Pod. For example, here's the beginning of the first article in the original calendar:

  Title:  Built in Our Workshop, Delivered in Your Package
  Package: Sub::Exporter

  =head1 Exporting

  In Perl, we organize our subroutines (and other stuff) into namespaces called
  packages.  This makes it easy to avoid having to think of unique names for

The two headers seen above, title and package, are the only headers required, and correspond to those attributes in the WWW::AdventCalendar::Article object created from the article file.

Finally, running advcal is easy, too. Here is its usage:

  advcal [-aot] [long options...]
    -c --config       the ini file to read for configuration
    -a --article-dir  the root of articles
    --share-dir       the root of shared files
    -o --output-dir   output directory
    --today           the day we treat as "today"; default to today

    -t --tracker      include Google Analytics; -t TRACKER-ID

Options given on the command line override those loaded form configuration. By running this program every day, we cause the calendar to be rebuilt, adding any new articles that have become available.

METHODS

build

  $calendar->build;

This method does all the work: it reads in the articles, decides how many to show, writes out the rendered pages, the index, and the atom feed.

read_articles

  my $article = $calendar->read_articles;

This method reads in all the articles for the calendar and returns a hashref. The keys are dates (in the format YYYY-MM-DD) and the values are WWW::AdventCalendar::Article objects.

ATTRIBUTES

title

The title of the calendar, to be used in headers, the feed, and so on.

uri

The base URI of the calendar, including trailing slash.

editor

The name of the calendar's editor, used in the feed.

year

The year being calendared.

categories

An arrayref of category names for use in the feed.

article_dir

The directory in which articles can be found, with names like YYYY-MM-DD.html.

share_dir

The directory for templates, stylesheets, and other static content.

output_dir

The directory into which output files will be written.

today

The date to treat as "today" when deciding how much of the calendar to publish.

tracker_id

A Google Analytics tracker id. If given, each page will include analytics.

AUTHOR

  Ricardo SIGNES <rjbs@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2009 by Ricardo SIGNES.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

cpanm WWW::AdventCalendar

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install WWW::AdventCalendar