This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Blog Management Progress Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

I've finally gotten around to creating some tools for automating the management of the blog server. This afternoon I knocked out a web interface for creating a new blog, and finished up the interface for disabling existing blogs. Other than the tedium of creating the SSP pages, it was all pretty easy - the only place that gave me a small hitch was the resetting of server state. Here's what I was doing at first:

VisualWave.WebSite clearSites.
VisualWave.WebSite allSites.

The problem is, I was doing that in the #doPost method of a servlet, and on the page I was redirecting to there was an expectation of finding a session variable called 'currentUser'. In its absence, the page redirected over to the login page. This confused me for a few minutes, until the obvious dawned on me - clearing all the sites also cleared all existing session state - so of course there were no session variables left! As it happens, the WebToolkit has a very straightforward API, so I went and looked at class WebSite. What I wanted to do was programmaticall add a site, or remove a site (depending on which management page is in use. Here's all I had to do:

Adding a site:

site := VisualWave.WebSite
               new: siteName
               fromFile: self siteFile
               in: VisualWave.WebSite siteConfiguration.
VisualWave.WebSite addSite: site.

Removing a site:

VisualWave.WebSite removeSiteNamed: siteName.

That's it - it's pretty easy to create a small set of site specific tools with the api provided (other than that SSP creation :) ).