Organisation of Data

The WebBrewery uses three directories, a project directory, a local preview directory and a public directory.

The project directory contains all control files. The page source files are contained in a sub-directory src. The following control files are used:

• Makefile: This is used by the GNU make utility to generate the HTML output. It contains the settings for the output directories. The user should edit this file to adapt it to his needs.
• brew.conf: The WebBrewery configuration file. It contains settings like filenames and suffices or switches for contents generation. The user might want to edit this file to adapt to his needs.
• Index Files: These files form the database of information relevant to your site, which is not associated with an individual page. There are index files for the structure of the site (projectname.content), link URLs (projectname.links), image URLs (projectname.figs) and data files (projectname.data).
• Template Files: The appearance of the web site is represented by one or more template files, which contain the HTML code defining the layout and common elements of all pages of a web-site. Usually these template files provide the standard HTML header, navigation elements and some optical elements as frame for the content. By using appropriate templates it is very easy to create web pages with a consistent look and feel. The standard file suffix for templae files is .tmpl.html.

The source files provide the content of the web site. They donīt contain redundant information like common layout and navigation elements or actual URLs. The separation of content on one side and templates and project database on the other hand allows you to concentrate on what is important: The information you want to provide to the people visiting your web-site.

The local preview output directory is used for HTML output during development. It allows to check and test the results of the page generation without touching the public versions of your pages. To generate the preview version of HTML output use the command:

make all.

The public output directory is used as destination, when generating public versions of your web-site. It can either be the actual directory your web server reads or the source for some mirroring to the location accessible by the web server. This mirroring is not (yet) provided by the WebBrewery. To generate the public version of HTML output use the command:

make public.