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Perl for Web Site Management
book

Perl for Web Site Management

by John Callender
October 2001
Beginner content levelBeginner
528 pages
15h 20m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Perl for Web Site Management

Chapter 15. Generating Links

This chapter continues the example begun in Chapter 14, which describes a project I participated in that involved creating a template system for an elementary-school web site. At this point in the project, with a template system and a tool for automatically rebuilding pages when the template changed, students were able to begin creating the two types of pages that would make up most of the site:

  • Personal pages for each participating student, with information about their favorite activities, their participation in the project, and so on

  • Leader pages profiling local leaders in a variety of categories: school, government, business, and so on

This chapter describes the next stage in the project, in which I created a system to automatically generate links between the site’s pages.

The Docbase Concept

The approach I took to building this feature was heavily influenced by Jon Udell’s concept of a docbase . As described in his book Practical Internet Groupware, a docbase is something of a hybrid, having features of both a document collection and a database.

A document collection, from this point of view, is a largely freeform collection of information. Whatever relationships connect the various individual documents in the collection are apparent only to a human being, rather than being encoded in a way that can be understood by a computer. Most small web sites are document collections. As a side effect of their freeform nature, the links connecting the pages ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565926471Catalog PageErrata