Introduction to the WebBrewery

The WebBrewery is a system for creating web pages. It takes care of the annoying tasks of web page design like maintaining links or consistent layout of the pages. You will need to know what you are doing when using the WebBrewery, but it will pay off. If you are afraid of Perl, Makefiles or even HTML, you will become happier with some other tools.

The basic principle of the WebBrewery is that you don't duplicate redundant data. You use templates to create the parts of your web pages which are always the same, you use central link, data and figure definition files to maintain your references to other URLs and figures.

The boring aspects of web page creation are the job of the brewery. Despite the templates and central files you just provide the pure HTML source code for your pages, containing only the information you want to publish, not the redundant headers, layout stuff, navigation elements or explicit URLs. This makes management of your web site easy. The WebBrewery takes care of actual creation of web pages, insertion of links, layout, navigation and some other details, you don't want to care about.

This documentation was also created with the WebBrewery. Its source is included with the distribution. Also a small example project is included. Have a look at this example code when in doubt of the exact function of the scripts.

What you have to know in order to efficiently use the WebBrewery is collected in this documentaion pages. The organisation of the scripts and data is described, detailed information about the format of the configuration files is given and a complete reference of used symbols is provided.

Note that the WebBrewery is an open-source project. This means that you can help making the WebBrewer a better tool by providing comments, bug-reports, suggestions, patches or whatever you feel to be appropriate.

I hope you have some fun with the WebBrewery.