Wrapping Lyris in Standard Pages

Wrapping a list server's default user interface in your web site's standard page header and footer is the first step in making the list server part of your web site.

I selected Lyris as ATLA's list server because it included an API that could be accessed via Perl scripts and its web interface was written in Perl. The actual integration was accomplished in several stages

The first step wrapped the standard Lyris end user interface in the standard page headers and footers used on ATLA's web site. A call to the standard ATLA web security function was added near the beginning of the initial Lyris script to allow only current ATLA members to have any access to the script. Though the Lyris Perl code is sparsely commented, it makes liberal use of long meaningful function and data names and is exceptionally well organized and structured. This made it a very simple task to locate where the standard page headers and footers were created and to remove this code and replace it with calls to the Perl functions that formatted ATLA's web pages. With less than half a day's work, the Lyris' web interface was available inside of and visually indistinguishable from the rest of ATLA's web site.

By taking advantage of a Lyris configuration option that only allowed the lists to be joined via the web interface and not via the standard email interface, the first step of integrating Lyris with the web site assured that only current ATLA members could join any of the lists.

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