[Ur] A direction for Ur/Web

[Karn Kallio]

> Hi there,
> 
> I was talking with Adam about the following:
> 
> there is a range of systems on how to create a website, starting from
> a simple Wordpress install through a php-hacked one and a Drupal site
> to an industrial site developed with Django or Ruby on Rails.
> 
> It would be nice to have a configuration framework like Wordpress has
> for Ur/Web websites.  There is no need to be a php/mysq expert to run
> a Wordpress site. It would be nice to have something similar for
> Ur/Web, thus having a low-level entry point for Ur/Web _users_. Being
> able to create themes for standard websites would be a plus.
> 
> There is a problem with Wordpress, namely, if someone tweaks a theme
> to have extra features, then the migration of website data becomes
> anything but easy. I do not have a proof but have the feeling that
> module signatures could help us.
> 
> Is there anybody out there having had this or a similar idea and could
> brainstorm about it?
> 

Well, some similar fuzzy brainstorming that has occurred to me before:

To have safely "tweakable" themes Ur/Web could represent them as types in some 
way.  That probably means Ur/Web will have to represent CSS too.  To naturally 
support user changes of themes at run time then probably implies that Ur/Web 
will need more support for dependent types, to allow expressions of a theme 
type depending on a value coming from a user.

There are a lot of ideas about automatic migration of data along changes that 
Ur/Web could adopt ... for example the Acoda project of WebDSL ( 
http://swerl.tudelft.nl/bin/view/Acoda ) or another interesting possibility 
could be along the lines of the work by David Spivak ( 
http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/informatics/ )

Just some random thoughts, nothing really coherent to say ...