ArsDigita Community System Documentation

For everyone:

• ACS FAQ

• Release notes for ACS 3.3: see also the venerable Version History and, if you're a programmer, the ACS 3.2 developers' guide to ACS 3.3     New

For people using the ACS to build and operate a website:

• ACS Installation Guide

  The following documents will eventually be superseded by the Installation Guide; in case of information conflicts, the Installation Guide should usually be given precedence.

  • ArsDigita Server Architecture for ensuring web service reliability
  • Installing under Unix
  • Installing under Windows 2000 (and Windows 98)
  • Upgrading the ACS

• Getting Started with the ACS [ACS4]

• ACS Administrators's Guide: to be revised for [ACS4]
  • Magic Files
  • Filters and Other Tricks
  • Database Pools
  • Directories
  • Obtaining and Installing APM Packages [ACS4]
  • Monitoring
  • Server Clustering: a facility for keeping state synchronized between a group of load-balanced servers
  • Redirects: ensuring that legacy URLs pointed to by bookmarks and search engines still work
  • Robot detection: making sure that your entire site gets indexed
  • Customer relationship management: tracking a customer relationship through its various states.
  • Member value: a way of accumulating charges for users and then billing them out at the end of each month (commercial sites) or excluding them from the community if the charges get too high (non-commercial)

• Installed Package Documentation: will be a link to a dynamically-generated page [ACS4]

• Individual Modules (Application Packages): until the above is actually a link

  Each module is owned by at least one programmer. The current list is in module-owners; each programmer is responsible for maintaining the module and the relevant portion of acceptance-test

  • /doc/address-book
  • /doc/adserver
  • /doc/bannerideas
  • /doc/bboard -- the discussion forum system
  • /doc/bookmarks
  • /doc/calendar
  • /doc/chat
  • /doc/classifieds
  • /doc/clickthrough
  • /doc/contact-manager -- good for sites with an extranet-y flavor
  • /doc/content-sections -- lets administrators add/manage different content sections of the site
  • /doc/contest -- run give-away contests
  • /doc/custom-sections -- allows group administrators add/manage custom sections of the site
  • /doc/curriculum
  • /doc/directory -- letting users find each other
  • /doc/display -- lets administrators set display settings and upload logo of the site
  • /doc/download -- offering versions of software or other stuff to people
  • /doc/dw -- a toolkit for data warehouse-style queries
  • /doc/ecommerce
  • /doc/education
  • /doc/events -- facilitates online registration for events
  • /doc/faq
  • /doc/file-manager -- simple content management tool
  • /doc/file-storage -- users who don't know HTML can collaboratively maintain a set of files on the server
  • /doc/glossary -- the ArsDigita Glossary, for creating an on-site dictionary of specialized terminology.
  • /doc/homepage -- give your users personal homepages on your system
  • /doc/intranet -- run your organization from this toolkit
  • /doc/neighbor -- Neighbor to Neighbor (hard to explain; see example at http://www.photo.net/neighbor/)
  • /doc/news
  • /doc/partner -- site-wide cobranding
  • /doc/poll -- opinion polls
  • /doc/portals -- using only a Web browser, build some portals for different groups within your organization (or the public)
  • /doc/press -- show press coverage about your site or company
  • /doc/pull-down-menus -- create Macintosh-style menu bars
  • /doc/spam -- send email to a group of users
  • /doc/static -- support for collecting comments, links, and download statistics for static files
  • /doc/survey-simple -- ask the users a series of questions
  • /doc/ticket -- a project and bug tracking system
  • /doc/wp -- WimpyPoint, a replacement for desktop bloatware like PowerPoint, allowing you to create and view presentations in your Web browsers

For engineers working on the development of ACS packages, both inside and outside ArsDigita:

• ACS Core Architecture Guide
  1. ACS Package Manager (APM)
  2. Request Processor
  3. Bootstrapping ACS
  4. Parties (Users and Groups) [ACS4]
  5. General Permissions [ACS4]: the design needs to be extended to address how default permissions are created
  6. Subcommunities [ACS4]
  7. Security and Sessions
  8. Database Access API
  9. Content Repository [ACS4]
  10. Content Management and Personalization [ACS4]

  To be reviewed and potentially revised or replaced for ACS4:

  • Writing an ACS Module
  • user registration
  • user administration: how the publisher can select a class of users and what can then be done with that class
  • user profiling and content categorization: matching users to content
  • user groups: a general mechanism for lumping users together in groups, e.g., all students in a particular course
  • user session tracking
  • Permissions Package: to be integrated with General Permissions
  • Content Sections
  • Site-wide Search: a system for indexing all of a site's content in one big table

• ACS Developer's Guide [ACS4]
  • /acs-examples/ -- source code that shows how to use the rest of the software
  • ...

• ACS Engineering Manual (needs consolidation and organization) [ACS4]
  • Standards
  • Programming with AOLserver
  • User Interface/Information Design
  • Process (design, review, testing)
  • Performance Tuning
  • Development Process (how to write, test, and release ACS code)
  • Release Version Numbering

  • Working with XML
  • Supporting WAP (Wireless Application Protocol)

  • Philip's Developer Guide
  • Templates and Multi-lingual Support
  • Building "Help" Documentation for the End-User

  • Tcl API (procedure-by-procedure)

    See also:

    • AOLserver documentation, a notably useful part of which is the Tcl Developer's Guide

  • Module Tools (Library Packages)
    • Audit -- adding a change history to a table
    • Calendar widget -- displaying calendars
    • Content tagging -- useful for finding/screening naughty words but with wider potential as well
    • Email handler -- queues incoming email into an Oracle table; let's you do things like unified customer support or email replies to tickets
    • Graphing -- generating bar charts
    • New stuff -- showing folks what is new site-wide
    • General comments -- allows you to collect user comments on any item
    • General links -- allows you to collect user links on any item
    • Prototype builder -- quickly build standard ACS pages via a user interface
    • Tools -- collections of scripts providing services to perform common tasks such as spell checking.
    • Version Control -- an interface to CVS for modules that need access to a version control system

For systems integrators:

• Systems Integrator's Guide to the ACS [ACS4]
  • Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and CORBA Interfaces [ACS4]
  • Mainframe Integration
  • ERP Integration (e.g., SAP, Oracle Applications) [ACS4]

Installation-Specific

• /doc/patches -- documentation of patches/fixes to the ArsDigita Community System (ACS) on this site; useful when you are upgrading and when we are building a new version of the system
• /doc/custom -- documentation of custom features that you've added to this site that will/can never be rolled into the ACS.
• Advertising -- how Google ads are kludged into this site

The Glorious Future

• /bboard revision
• templating, navigation, forms, and other enhancements
• general cleanup
• LDAP authentication

Copyright and Legal Status of this Software

This software is mostly Copyright 1995-2000 ArsDigita Corporation and licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (June 1991).