BPAS website technical info

This page has nothing to do with medieval re-enactment, rather its a discription of all the tools and code used to create and maintain the site. Obviously if this is of no interest to you than ignore it, otherwise read on. All the code here is released under the GNU open source licence, so if its of any use then feel free to use it.

I've written all the code myself and don't claim its the best or only way to do it, especially as I generally treat the site as a training tool so these are often the first time I've tried the various techniques.

I use eclipse for java and perl coding on Ubuntu Linux (with active perl on windiws) for perl development.

The run down of tools and programs is below, click on the links to see the pages and code that generates them.

The main site was originally built and maintained using MS Frontpage 98 on windows but I have switched over to KompoZer on linux for HTML editing.
Images and photos are created and manipulated using the GIMP
I maintain a membership database in mySQL on Linux (Ubuntu), with Perl Catalyst webpages used as a GUI front end. I've developed this myself and provides the following features accessed via a Web GUI interface (was original MS access but ported over to mySQL):
- List of members with contact details, character and kit details and auto generation of membership cards.
- List of planned shows and all relevant details.
- List of members planned to attend each show, linked to show and members and viewable from both sides i.e. From a show see all members attending a show,from a member see all shows they are attending.
- Storage of guestbook entries.
- Archiving of past years.
- Various reports: contact list, renewals, attendance, contact list export for outlook import.
- Generation of static webpages for the website - Shows lists, attendance list
The following pages are generated from the membership mySQL database using various Perl and Java programes:
- The Guestbook - guestbook.java ( gbFile.java & gbFilter.java) to load e-mails send from the guestbook page into the database using JDBC and guestbookweb.perl to generate the web page using the DBI & CGI packages.
- Show list - Was originally generate by the CGI script showswebtemplate.perl using the DBI, CGI and HTML::Template packages (and the template file ShowList_template.htm). Now migrated to the perl Catalyst MVC framework.
- Attendance list Was originally generated by theCGI script attendweb.perl using the DBI & CGI packages from the show and attendance details in the database. Now changed to the perl cataylst MVC framework.
- Market Place - marketweb.perl to generate the page using the DBI & CGI packages from the market details in the database.
- Show summary list. Generated using the perl catalyst MVC framework against the mySQL database
Javascript is used on the following pages for form validation, buttons and navigation, view the source to have a look.
- Index - Main Menu Navigation Buttons.
- photo album - Frames based photo naviagation.
- show list - Form validation
- guestbook - Form validation
Shoot the knight - This is a simple java applet game, stk.java
Photo album pages are generated using a perl CGI script to create a page based on a list of files in a directory and a config file to add titles and descriptions to the page. The album to display is passed as a parameter in the URL.

genphotopage.pl - Script to generate a page. Assumes a common "album" directory with each album in a further sub-directory. Each album can then have a further "high" sub-directory with high-res versions of each image.
albumList.cfg - Sample config file for the list of albums. Links the parmeter in recieved URL to the actual album sub-directory.
album.cfg - Sample config file for an individual album. Allows Titles and Descriptive text to be added to photos and a main title and description for the page.