Sams Teach Yourself CGI in 24 Hours, Second Edition

A Content Publishing Example

Let’s look at an example of how a content publishing system might work. This example illustrates how an online publication like a magazine or newspaper might publish articles using a template system. In this case, the page will be generated every time the user visits the page. The system consists of three components: a story-input program (which allows writers to submit stories), the stories themselves, and a story-display program (which applies a template to a story and displays it in the browser).

First let’s look at the template file and the data files. The template looks like a regular HTML file but it contains placeholders that take will be populated with content from the data files. The template file is included ...