Example Webgen (tm) Site

Webgen (tm) takes database output and turns it into a series of static HTML pages. In addition Webgen (tm) creates static index pages (you can also think of these index pages as table-of-content-type pages).

By clicking on the selections below you can see a live example of the components of a Webgen (tm) generated web site from the initial database to template guidelines to the final set of pages. What follows is a short description of those components and how they behave in this example site.

Webgen (tm): Webgen is C code compiled in a UNIX environment. The program parses every field in every record in a database, and feeds it through a set of templates you've made to create static HTML pages. We make no changes to Webgen (tm) itself to set it up for a given site. We currently do not give you the option of downloading Webgen (tm): please contact ILC if you're interested in talking about licensing this software.

Database: To create a web site from a database you need a database to start with. In this example you'll see a FileMaker Pro database being used. You may download this FileMaker file or download the merge file created by the FileMaker file. The merge file is what Webgen (tm) uses as input.

For this demo we've taken information from the ILC website and put it into a FileMaker database.

Though we're using FileMaker here please note that any database software would work.

Merge file: Webgen (tm)'s input must be in the form of a merge file. This is an ascii file where the first record is made up exclusively of field names, and the following records contain data for that file with each field being demarcated by some delimiter. You can download the merge file we use in this demo below.

Templates: Webgen (tm) generated sites rely on a set of templates for instructions in TCL on how each sort of web page should look, and what it should contain. You assign each record in the database a "templateType" and when Webgen (tm) encounters a record of a given type it looks at the corresponding template to see how to present the data from that record in HTML.

The templateTypes for this demo are relatively simple:: Client; People; Gallery
Webgen (tm) generates indexes based on templates also:: IndexClient; IndexPeople; IndexGallery

Configurations: Webgen (tm) gets further instructions from a set of configuration files. You can read more about these files in the documentation. You may also download the configuration files for this demo below.

You might not notice everything Webgen (tm) is doing on for this demo site unless it's pointed out:

In the gallery pages notice that in the database you simply feed in a file name in the appropriate field. Webgen (tm) has a routine where it goes and looks for the file and determines the size for you.
The index pages are in alphabetical order. Webgen (tm) does this, but it could also sort your index pages according to any other criteria you wanted or it could only list items created in the last thirty days or whatever.
In the Employee template you'll see some "if" statements, so that if certain fields contain values they'll show up on the final HTML page but if not they won't.
You can have characters in a database that are innapropriate for HTML -- such as the copyright symbol or curly quotes. You may filter out or replace those sort of characters as you like.
You can have any information you'd like appear on the index pages. Usually we'd assume you want the title, but you can have as well the creation date of the file, or as in the case of the clients index page you can have a short descriptor field.

This demo doesn't fully take advantage of all of Webgen (tm)'s capabilities. We wanted to keep it relatively simple. Some things Webgen (tm) can do, but is not doing here include:

Creating complex indexes based on any criteria you want.
Creating second level indexes, or indexes of indexes.
Interfacing with a search engine.
Handling internally delimited fields such as FileMaker Pro's repeating fields.

On to the demo site