Advent Calendar Technical Information

General Information

The logic for the Advent Calendar package is a perl script. There is nothing which requires compiling or building.
The package is distributed installed in a format compatible with use as /opt/adventcal. For convenient use with your Web server, you may need to add soft links to your Web CGI and document trees as described below.

License

This package is copyright 1999 by Dave Eaton, Artronic Development, Phoenix, AZ (dwe@arde.com) and released under the terms of the "GNU Public License". A copy of that license may be found in the file "COPYING" distributed with this package and on the Web at: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

Operating Environment

This package requires that a copy of perl 5 has been installed on your system. The package has been tested and run on several variations of UN*X platforms, including HP-UX, Linux, and Solaris and has been used with the Apache and Netscape Web servers.

Installation

Obtaining Package

The adventcal package is available in these formats:

http://www.arde.com/Papers/AdventCal/adventcal-1.0.tar.gz (130 KB)
http://www.arde.com/Papers/AdventCal/adventcal-1.0.zip (156 KB)

Installing

The script assumes perl is installed as /opt/perl/* and that the binary may be found at /opt/perl/bin/perl. If this is not the case, you will need to modify the first line of the perl script in the package's cgi-bin directory to adjust for your environment.
If your Web server does not define the environment variable "DocumentRoot", then edit the path to the top of your document tree into the line of the script which reads:
```
     $doc_root = '';
```
To use this package conveniently with your Web server, you may want to add a couple of links to point to the script from your cgi directory and to point to the directory containing the configuration file and the images from a location accessible from your Web server. Assuming your Web files are installed under "/opt/web", these links are suggested:
```
   ln -s /opt/adventcal/html /opt/web/htdocs/adventcal
   ln -s /opt/adventcal/cgi-bin/advent.pl /opt/web/cgi-bin/advent.pl
```
If you install the configuration and images in another location, you may need to change the value assigned to $configdir in the script. This variable must be relative to the DocumentRoot environment variable used by your Web server so the script can locate the appropriate files. If your Web server requires a specific CGI script name extension (such as .cgi), you may rename the script to conform to your needs or provide a soft link to the real script:
```
   ln -s advent.pl advent.cgi
```

Testing

The script accepts a few arguments as part of the URL to facilitate testing. The format of these arguments is:

   ?mday+12+mon+11+testid+mytest

The day (12 in the example above) allows modification of the current day so that various instances may be tested. Likewise, the month (11 in the example) may be set so that testing of the actual images may be accomplished prior to December. The value of the "testid" may be changed via the configuration file to control who may request such tests. Samples of these tests allow simulating such dates as:

Configuring

This package may be customized for your environment by modifying a text configuration file. The default configuration file is "advent.conf" in the "adventcal/conf/" directory under "document root", but a different file in this directory may be used if the calling URL defines a value for "Client" by using the format: ".../advent.pl?Client+clientname" In this case, the configuration file name will be "clientname.conf" in the directory noted above. Separate configuration information is available to assist you.