the Design Experience Weblog Archive

One compromise I had to make in implementing WebDAV into OpenACS was only allowing authenticated access. MS Web Folders will to reauthenticate if a folder was originally access anonymously, so writes to the folder will fail instead of asking for a username and password. I don't see this as a big problem. The WebDAV folders are accessed from a different URI than the public ones and I don't see a huge market for view-only WebDAV access. Authoring is DAV's middle name and write access is what makes it interesting.

The official release of this code is coming along. The WebDAV supoort works quite well. The web user interface to the file-storage folders is still being improved.

Next, I though I had fixed the issue with # in filenames, which should be legal, as long as it is url encoded. Web Folders doesn't agree and shows a collection as a child of itself when a # is part of the collection name. This works in cadaver, so its not impossible to support. I even tested a Zope server, and it has the same issue, so it is clearly a problem with Web Folders not decoding the URL when it should.

Besides that Jeff helped me quite a bit fixing little bugs, and resolved issues with the Mac OS X client that ended up being a few bugs in different layers of OpenACS, AOLserver, and bits of the code I wrote.

The next step will be to build an actual CMS and WebDAV enable that. It is pretty straightforward to WebDAV enable any OpenACS Content Repository items. It might be possible to enable edit-this-page, but I really want to bury that package and replace it with one with a design that conforms to the content repository usage a little better. That actually will end up making it easier to setp WebDAV.