What I need is for a Cron driven script to hit a php/perl script that will a traverse all the subdirectories in a given filesystem/directory and not just create a simple site map, but create content sections and categories based on those folder names, and then writes meta data into a database for each object it finds ie:
- if an object is nested four folders deep, then the names of those folders and the filename of the object become metadata
- The top level folders are sections, the second level folders are categories, and the n-level folders become subcategories right down to the last folder which is an entry , an entry which simply contains thumbnails of the different files.
- recognization of a significant variety of file formats: image, document, pdf, pages, office docs, fonts, etc.
- a media player.
- thumbnail and list views.
- statistical reporting (number to files total, per category, per file type, new
-versioning (how will this work?)
I need to gather components that will make this happen
- the script that will crawl directories
- identify file types and write a database table with filename/filetype
- traverse each known filetype and associate it with either and icon or a thumbnail
- read direcotry names and assign new tables and relationships.
- write metadata to object database
ugh, this could go on. I’ve got a good idea of what I want, and I just need to start writing it, piecemeal, over time. Ruby? Perl? I have a fondness in my heart for the speed, power and efficiency of perl, but I like the easy of dev with ruby.
I think it should maybe be able to write, XML, RSS and XHTML.
more later.