On Wed, May 26, 2004 at 03:00:35PM +1000, Peter Rundle wrote: > Last time I was involved in this stuff web sites used frames, these seemed > to have fallen from favour and most sites appear to be using cascading
Thank $DEITY for that. > However, what sort of techniques are being used to put these pages > together? I played around and managed to successfully create such a site by > "hand" but obviously unless the process of merging the main content of the > page with the header and the navigate <div> areas was automated this would > become painful and lead to typo's etc. Some form of Content Management System is the usual way. You have content, usually written per-page, which slips into some form of template, which is used site-wide (or some subset of the site). > So are most sites generating such pages dynamically at http get time, or > are there software packages available to put such content together (Linux > based of course)? I think most of them are doing it dynamically, but there's no particular reason why you couldn't have an app that generated all of the pages in a batch and put them somewhere. > E.G The content produced by a user creating pages in say Mozilla Composer > needs quite a bit of cropping and cleaning to be placed as the content in a > CSS sheet site (like say fedora.redhat.com) Obviously they aren't doing it > like this. Are there wysiwyg composers for html that understand they need > to produce just the content, are they style sheet "aware", care to > recommend any? I just hack on the HTML myself. There are HTMLArea editors built into IE and Mozilla, but (the IE one at least) sucks arse. Really, teaching dopes simple markup (and most of the content should be marked up as simply as possible) isn't that hard. You give them a cheatsheet and use a validator on it afterwards. > Also looking at server side content development and management tools. Have > had a preliminary look at Zope, which seems to have some impressive claims. > Basically looking for a tool that will allow data from an RDBMS (probably > postgres) to be displayed and undated via web pages, preferably without > having to write lots of cgi and matching .html forms pages. Again any > recommendations, tools that I should look at. The dynamic generation of forms is largely a different issue to content management. There isn't much out there that I've found for easily defining data-driven web apps, which is why I wrote one myself. Have a look at http://www.baileyroberts.com.au/brite/bronto for the work-in-progress. A SLUG talk may be forthcoming on the subject if anyone cares about it. Basically you define your data layer, define your forms on top of it (with very little coding required), and then skin it to your heart's content with CSS and templates (which can be similar to those used for your static content). Bronto then proceeds to manage all of the data in / HTML out business you normally spend all your time putting together. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
