Using BillB

Luca Fini (lfini@arcetri.astro.it). June 2005

About Install Config Usage Copyright F.A.Q.

Adding a billboard to a Web site

When you have a billboard configured in your web site you must provide two kinds of access:
  1. Access to billboard documents

    That's as simple as putting a reference to the proper URL. Assuming you have defined a billboard named News, the URL for the billboard index is:

    http://my.web.site/cgi-bin/wb.py?News
    or, if you can use a relative URL specification,
    /cgi-bin/wb.py?News
    that can be used anywhere in the Web site directory tree.

  2. Access to maintenance commands

    To access to the maintenance interface you can use the URL:

    http://my.web.site/cgi-bin/wb.py
    /cgi-bin/wb.py      (relative)

Adding and editing documents


Using maintenance commands

Billboard maintenance consists in removing expired documents (or moving them in a different directory, depending on configuration).

The maintenance command can be invoked either from the web interface or as a standard Unix command (may be from a cron job, if you want to clean billboards automatically).

Here follows a few examples:

  1. The URL: http://my.web.site/cgi-bin/wb.py?.clr
    Will perform a clean on all defined billboards.

  2. You can access the maintenace command selectively for each defined billboard from the maintenance interface.

  3. The command: [path]/wb.py -m [Billboard_dir]
    Will clean-up all the billboards, removing expired cocuments.

    Log file

    If logging is enabled in the configuration of WB, all operations will be logged in a file named wb.log in the billboard root directory. The log file is closed when it reaches a suitable size and a new log file is created. Proper rotation of log files is also performed.