User's Guide

Table of Contents

• 1. General introduction
  
• 2. Architecture of diWEBlo
  
• 3. How diWEBlo works
  
• 4. Format of template files
  
• 5. HTML template formats
  
• 6. Installing diWEBlo
  
• 7. Author of the program
  
• 8. Legal
  
• 9. diWEBlo Pro
  

It reads text files and produces text files. It was designed to be used with HTML, but as a matter of fact nothing HTML specific is implemented in it.

diWEBlo gets CGI parameters, GET and POST parameters as well. The most important parameters are

• template or
• display which should define the name of the template.
• Password which should have a value equal to the Password value specified in the template file.

All other CGI parameters can be named arbitrarily and will be processed by diWEBlo, except a special one: diweblo. This parameter will be overwritten by diWEBlo to contain a reference text, like This page was generated by diWEBlo v1.0. You are encouraged to include a

<!--#diweblo diweblo-->

1. diWEBlo first of all processes the CGI variables and puts them into an internal array.

2. diWEBlo reads the template file specified by the CGI parameter template or display. On format of template files read 4. Format of template files.

3. If the template has a Password field diWEBlo checks that the CGI input parameters also contain a variable named Password and the value of it matches the value of the password given in the template file. This password checking phase is skipped when the template name is given by the cgi parameter display as in this case no modification performed by diWEBlo, only a Web page is displayed with information which is on the Web anyway.

4. diWEBlo determines the name of the output file. This is done even when the edit page is to be displayed, because this name is used to determine the data file.

5. diWEBlo then reads the data file, if it exists. For each Web page there is a data file in a directory specified by the template field Data having the same name as the Web page and the extension .data.

6. Each field defined in the data file is checked against the CGI variable array, and in case a variable is not defined by CGI but is defined in the data file it is added to the CGI array.

7. If the process is to create a new file and not just displaying a Web page then diWEBlo saves the content of the CGI array to the data file.

8. On the other hand if the process does not generate a new file, only displays the edit web page it tries to get the HTML template for it from the template field Edit or if it does not exists from the file given by the template field EditFile.

9. If the HTML template is not defined when the program gets here (either because neither Edit nor EditFile is specified by the template or because diWEBlo is going to create a new file and not just to show an edit page) it gets the HTML template from the template field Template or from a file given by template field TemplateFile.

10. diWEBlo converts the HTML template to the final form inserting the actual values of the parameters to the appripriate places. diWEBlo takes the actual values from the array where the CGI variables were put and was merged with the values taken from the data file. This means that if the edit page does not include some parameter then it will not be deleted, but keep with the old value. This way you can create several template files each creating the same Web page, and therefore working with the same DATA file, but allowing different users to edit different values only.

11. Finally diWEBlo emits the result either to the screen or to the result file.

If any error occures during processing diWEBlo emits an error page to the browser.

key: value

key: --This does not appear in the value
this is
a multiline
value
--This does not appear in the value

<!-- this is a comment -->

<!--#diweblo parametername-->

<!-- #  diweblo  parametername     -->

The word diweblo should be all lowercase.

You can install it copying the Perl file into a directory that the Web server can access and execute. You probably will change the /usr/local/bin/perl path on the first line of the script to the Perl executable and edit the line

$template_directory = 'd:/InetPub/wwwroot/progs/perl/diweblo/';

If your Web server complains about missing header lines or alikes then you probably have to change the line

$Status = 'HTTP/1.0 200 OK';

$Status = 'Status: 200 OK';

The program was tested with IIS3.0 and IIS4.0 under WindowsNT, but I would be surprised if it did not work under most UNIX operating systems. My favorite is Digital UNIX.

Any statement, assumption expressed or implied in this document, in any attached document, program source code, or in any other information source associated with this program, belong to the author, and might not reflect the views of anyone else.

The development of the program was sponsored by no one. I have done it in my free time at home using resources that I have legally purchased, including hardware and software.

You are free to use and distribute diWEBlo as far as your actions are in line with the GNU General Public License. I would also appreciate if you could include a reference text on one or more of the pages that you create on a site using diWEBlo. This can be done using the predefined parameter <!--#diweblo diweblo-->.

• Challenge response authentication inaddition to password authentication.
• Archive old pages.
• Integration with a modified version of text2html.
• Integration with jamal
• Activity logging.