The situation:
In a project for an educational institution we would like to use
Forrest to create a static web site that can be copied to a cheap and
simple Web-Space-provider.
Some pages (about, locations, lecturers etc.) are more or less static
and will - for now - be manually ported to xml and
referenced in site.xml and tabs.xml in the usual way. That's the easy
part!
The pages for all the courses however are to be generated by
transformations from one big XML-file (created by exporting
their course management system).
This part of the web site will probably have its own Tab ("Courses")
with several sub tabs for broader subject areas
("Languages","Cooking","Computer Skills" etc.)and at least two levels
of menus.
E.g.
Tab: Courses
Subtab: Languages
Menu: English
Submenu: Level 1
Page: Course outline and listing of individual English Level 1 courses
MY QUESTION:
Since everything below the Courses-Tab needs to be generated from the
database, how can I best integrate this with Forrests site.xml and
tab.xml.
1. Create the static structure, test it and then use the tested
tabs.xml and site.xml as statics building blocks in my transformation.
This seems worst case as changes to the rest of Forrest get
complicated.
2. I found several references to book.xml, that it can still be used and
is supposed to have priority when found in a directory.
Unfortunately I found no more info on
- the required structure of book.xml
- how to reference it on site and tabs (or not at all)
Is this deprecated?
3. Can I use directory-based selection for only parts of my Forrest?
I looks like it for all or none of the site.
4. Is there another way to generate the courses-sections of site and
tabs in my transformation, put it into separate files and have Forrest
include these into site and tabs when compiling the site?
Insights much appreciated,
Ferdinand Soethe
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Ferdinand Soethe
