[ic] About Interchange

[interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com]

Quoting Vortex75 (vortex75@swbell.net):
> Is Interchange for E-commerce only or is it possible to use it for content
> management similar to what ASP or Cold Fusion offers?

Yes, absolutely it is suitable. Some of the busiest Interchange sites
have nothing for sale. For example, Freecell.com, running Interchange
4.8 in PreFork mode, serves 2.5 million hits and as many as 300,000
parsed page hits per day (all on a single 850MHz Athlon and 384M RAM).

It is possible to do very complex content-syndication stuff with
Interchange. For instance, in about 3 hours this morning I wrote an RSS
syndication access component which accepts a URL containing an RSS/RDF
feed and produces "slashboxes" based on that. It has a complete
templating setup which is identical to all of the other Interchange
lists, and it only took me a couple-three of hours to do.

> If it is possible,
> where can a "getting started" guide be found online in order to learn how to
> setup Interchange and develop for it? I have looked through the available
> docs in the documentation area but they are very vague and talk to you as if
> you have been developing it for years and know what they are talking about.

There I can't help you. Perhaps because I wrote the vast majority of the
docs, I can't see the problem. I think the best starting place is
the tutorial, which I didn't write. 8-)

Another starting point is to build a test catalog and just start
changing stuff in the pages/ directory. Eventually it becomes pretty
clear, or at least it appears that hundreds or thousands of people have
been able to get to the point where they can do stuff with it.

Personally, it took me about 6 months learning Perl 5.0 before it really
*clicked*. Some people never really get Perl -- I have a musician friend
who is absolutely god-like in a musical way, but I am not sure it will
ever click for him like it does for me. We all have different talents,
and programming is not every person's talent.

> Is there an online resource for those who are new to the Interchange system?

Most of Interchange is database, HTML/web, and Perl. If you understand
those things, it shouldn't be that big a deal learning it based on the
docs. If you don't understand those things well, in that order, it will
be a struggle.

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