Author: cd@conference.org
Description: PerlPointCD Demo

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Start / Lightning Talks / Jochen Stenzel Next: Directory order Previous: Configure the make call TOC

# Defaults

Do you remember the directory structure? There's an author level, which typically holds a speaker bio in an `author.pp` file.

But the author level is below the talk type level. Which means that if a speaker gives talks of various types, his `author.pp` file needs to be present in several author level directories.

      Tutorials/Speaker/talk.pp
      Invited_Talks/Speaker/talk.pp
      Long_Talks/Speaker/talk.pp
      Short_Talks/Speaker/talk.pp
      Lightning_Talks/Speaker/talk.pp
      BOFs/Speaker/talk.pp

OK, that's a very busy speaker in this example. But we know about people like this ;-) Ah, and even more if archives are taken into account: each of these directories might belong to another conference year.

      2003/Tutorials/Speaker/talk.pp
      2002/Invited_Talks/Speaker/talk.pp
      2001/Long_Talks/Speaker/talk.pp
      2000/Short_Talks/Speaker/talk.pp
      1999/Lightning_Talks/Speaker/talk.pp
      1998/BOFs/Speaker/talk.pp

Which leads us to another issue: the speaker might like to see an updated bio about his 100 talks in the archives. So do you have to search all the relevant author directories and to copy the latest version of the bio files to there? Of course, not. ;-) Instead of this, use a default file.

A default file is searched in the defaults directory tree. The tree root can be specified in the `makefile` (or in the `make` call, respectively) by the macro `DEFAULTS`. By default, this is `prepare/defaults`.

      make DEFAULTS=prepare/new_defaults

This directory can hold subdirs named like the various directory types - of course `author`, but also `type` and `talk`. 4 According to the directory structure for the talks, subdirectories below this type directory show which defaults are set up: under `authors`, author name directories corresponding to the CD directories are expected.

      author
        |
        |-- Speaker_1
        |     |
        |     |-- author.pp
        |
        |-- Speaker_2
        |     |
        |     |-- author.pod 5
        |
        |-- Speaker_3
        |     |
        |     |-- author.pp
        |
        ...

So for the more algorithmic readers, if PerlPointCD cannot find an `author.pp` file directly, it looks up the defaults tree using the author directory name to search.

Which means that a default is only a fallback - if you want to have a special version of a bio, just store it in the author directory, and an existing default will be ignored.

4: I suppose that `author` will be used mostly ...

5: Of course, this works.

Index-related:

- Directory order
- Import filters can be added
- PerlPoint macros ready to use
- Welcome and Impressum
- Configure the make call
- Integrating stuff

Next: Directory order Previous: Configure the make call TOC Start / Lightning Talks / Jochen Stenzel