LDP/LDP/lampadas

This is Lampadas, an online document production and publication system.
Lampadas is Free Software; see COPYING for details.

Lampadas is a young project, although it is based on the LDP Database,
which has been in actual use for over a year. It is not yet recommended
for production use.


Requirements
------------

See INSTALL for requirements.


Applicable Standards
--------------------

Lampadas adheres to the following standards:

ISO 639 Language Codes, http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/ert/iso639.htm
Unicode Encoding, http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/standard.html


Security
--------

Anyone may browse and search the database, however only registered users can
make changes to the database at this time.

Each user is recorded in the `username' table. If the 'admin' field is 't',
the user may alter any document information in the database. If the 'sysadmin'
field is set to 't', the user may also alter system data, such as
configuration records. If the document_user table has a record for a user,
the user may edit those documents and their meta-data.

Admins may add new maintainers and documents.

Only admins and authors may edit documents, and authors may only edit their
own documents.

The SysAdmin level allows very low level system configuration. I recommend
that a very small number of people be given SysAdmin rights for system
configuration. Admin level is all that is needed to work with the system,
including user and document administration.


Architecture
------------

Lampadas is implemented as a set of Python modules. See the documentation
in /doc for information about the Python libraries.

The data is stored in a PostgreSQL database for scalability and speed.

The goal is to eventually provide support for mod_python as well as additional
databases.

The LDP Database, upon which Lampadas is based, was written in Perl.
We are working on a Python conversion which is not yet functional.


System Variables
----------------

System variables are stored in the 'config' table as name/value pairs.
Variable names are case-sensitive.

version
	The program version. This isn't really the version of the code,
	but the version of the database tables. However, the code and database
	versions must be in sync or the system will fail, perhaps horribly.
	
smtp_server
	This is the full domain name of your mail server, which is used when
	sending mail to users. Relaying must be allowed by the user under whom
	the web server is running, or mail will fail.

	If mail fails, users will not be able to register!

copyright
	This holds the copyright statement for the site. You may add to it as
	appropriate, but remember that much of the content is generated by
	Lampadas, and  is Copyrighted by David C. Merrill.
	
	Please do not remove my copyright statement, but amend it as
	appropriate for your installation.

local_email
	Place the email address here that you want to appear in the From header
	on all mail sent by Lampadas.

cookie_domain
	This is the domain name used when setting cookies. Note that to prevent
	cookies from being set in TLDs (e.g., .edu or .com), this value
	must contain two periods, as specified in RFC 2109. So, for example,
	for lampadas.org the cookie should be set to '.lampadas.org'.

hostname
	The hostname of the server. Used when doing redirects.

root_dir
	The root directory where Lampadas is available on your web server.
	It must end with a /.

cvs_root
	The root directory of the CVS tree. Filenames must be below this dir.
	It must end with a /.