                            WWW::Kontent 0.01 README                            
                            ========================

A couple warnings before we begin:

*** THIS SYSTEM WILL NOT RUN IN PERL 5.  IT REQUIRES THE EXPERIMENTAL PERL 6 ***
*** COMPILER, PUGS, AND THE CROSS-LANGUAGE PARROT INTERPRETER.               ***

*** THIS RELEASE IS AN EARLY ALPHA, AND IS BY NO MEANS READY FOR DEPLOYMENT. ***
*** IF YOU'RE THINKING ABOUT USING THIS FOR ANYTHING REAL YET, YOU'RE NUTS.  ***
*** IT MAY DESTROY YOUR DATA, ERASE YOUR HARD DRIVE, MAX OUT ALL YOUR CREDIT ***
*** CARDS, OR TELL YOUR MOTHER EXACTLY WHAT YOU'VE BEEN DOING WITH THAT      ***
*** LOVELY GIRL YOU'RE GOING OUT WITH.  YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!                ***

ABOUT KONTENT
=============
Kontent is a web content management system written in Perl 6.  Kontent's basic 
principle is separation of concerns: whenever possible, the  system is 
separated into swappable components.  The webmaster chooses a "supervisor" to 
interface with their web server and a "store" to hold all pages in the system; 
individual pages have different "classes" implementing different behaviors; and 
each page can be displayed with any of several "renderers" .

Kontent is simple enough to need only a small amount of configuration, and 
flexible enough to meet the needs of almost any site.  It takes care of the 
niggling details of web design--tasks like revision control, site templating, 
and user contributions--leaving only the task of plugging in your own content.

Kontent is currently executable in Pugs installations with Parrot available; 
the storage subsystem included in this installation also requires the Perl 5 
interop feature, but an alternate system could be written.

For installation instructions, including how to build a suitable copy of Pugs, 
see the INSTALL file in this distribution.

ABOUT THIS RELEASE
==================
Version 0.01 is an incomplete alpha release.  It implements much of Kontent's 
basic functionality, such as creation and editing of pages, page versioning, 
page classes, and multiple renderers.  It does *not* have parsers (to specify 
formatting in pages), user or access control systems, online configuration (the 
ability to view and adjust settings via the Web), or online documentation.  It 
is also missing many page classes which will eventually be implemented.

At this point, while Pugs is quite capable of running Kontent, it does so very 
slowly.  On my laptop (1.6GHz, 512 MB RAM, MySQL 4.0, Linux) a single request 
can take up to ten seconds to process.  This has more to do with Pugs than 
Kontent; Pugs is designed more for ease of hacking than execution speed.
Further, although I have gone to great lengths to avoid performing operations 
that are even remotely dangerous, no security work has been done on Kontent.  
The upshot is that this system should not be run on an unprotected public 
server; if nothing else, a clueless spider could accidentally DoS you.

The purpose of this release is simply to demonstrate the progress being made 
and give possible users an idea of what they can expect from the project.  I'm 
rather excited at the potential this project has been showing; hopefully you 
will be, too.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
================
This project would not be possible without the support of The Perl Foundation 
and Google's Summer of Code program, and especially my mentor at TPF, Curtis 
"Ovid" Poe.  Nor would it be possible without the efforts of Larry Wall and the 
Perl 6 design team to define the language, and Autrijus Tang and the Pugs team 
to implement it.

MORE INFORMATION
================
Development blog:
    <http://use.perl.org/~brentdax/journal>
Interview about the project:
    <http://www.perlfoundation.org/news/2005/socwwwkontent.html>
Summer of Code 2005 site:
    <http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html>

Kontent does not yet have an official web site; that will come when it is fast 
and powerful enough to run the site on it.
