Quickstart with a text editor
For advanced users: use a text editor to create your own webgeno site
Any text editor will do. You can use something as simple as Notepad but it's recommended to use a program like Notepad++ or Vim that can do syntax highlighting and indentation to make your XML more readable.
Note: this guide assumes that you are starting with the default website.xml file that ships with webgeno. It also assumes that you have installed webgeno and run it once to produce the initial version of the site as detailed in the installation guide.
The first thing to do in customizing the site for your purposes is to change the values (contained within single or double quotes) of the "attributes" of the "website element" in website.xml to describe your own website. Ignore the xmlns, xmlns:xsi, and xsi:schemaLocation attributes. These will not need to be changed. The remaining attributes (name, title, author, domain, and mainpage) are pretty self explanatory. They describe the site as a whole (not a particular page). The only tricky one is the mainpage attribute. Leave it alone for the time being. Note that you cannot put either of the quote characters in the value for these attributes because they used as delimeters for these values. Other characters to avoid are: &, <, and >. It is an oversimplification to say that you can't use these characters but it will do for now. Change the attributes to describe your site and then run webgeno and note the effect by reloading the site in your browser. You will have to press the refresh button on your browser before you will see any changes. See the troubleshooting page if webgeno gives you any errors when you try to run it.
The next thing to do is to customize the attributes of the one and only page that currently comprises your site. This is similar to what we did with the website element. The "title" attribute describes the title that will come up at the top of the page. The "menuas" attribute describes how to show this page in the site menu. The site menu is usually displayed as a menu-bar on the top of the site or a side-bar on the left (depending on the template). If no "menuas" attribute is specified, this page will not be shown in the site menu. The "id" attribute is the most important. Every page must have an "id" attribute. This is the unique identifier for this page and every page which occurs at the same depth-level in the site hierarchy must have a unique value to distinguish it from the other pages. This id determines the name of the directory that corresponds to this page. Since some operating systems don't allow directories to have spaces in their names, it's better not to use spaces in your id's. You should change the id to be something that's more descriptive of this page. When you do this you will have to change the website element's mainpage attribute to match this value. The last thing to do is to change the text in the "p" (for paragraph) element. This is where the content of the site resides. "p" elements don't have any attributes. All their information lies between the starting <p> and ending </p> tags. Since the quote characters are not used as delimeters here, you are free to use them within the p-element, but you should still avoid the &, <, and > characters for now. Replace the text that's currently there with some of your own content. Close your browser and run webgeno with the --clean or -c flag. Rerun webgeno and re-open then index.html file in a browser. Note the difference due to your changes.
Within a page you can create as many paragraphs as you want. After the end tag (ie. </p>) of the previous paragraph you add another start tag (ie. <p>) then the text of your second paragraph, followed by another paragraph end tag. If you forget to add either the start or the end tag you will get a "mismatched tag" error when you try to run webgeno. To avoid this problem it's usually good practice to start by adding both the start tag and the end tag (ie. <p></p>) and then go back and fill in the content between the two tags. That way you won't forget.
Similar to creating a new paragraph, you can create a new page by inserting a new page element after the current page. Don't forget to add both the start and the end tag and make sure you give the page a unique id. Add any other page attributes that are appropriate as well. Paragraphs inside of paragraphs don't make a whole lot of sense, but pages within page do. Creating pages within pages will define the hierarchy of your site. To create a page within a page, simply add another page start / end tag before the end tag of the parent page like so. Note that for XML, spacing characters (tabs, returns, and single spaces) are irrelevant. But it's often helpful for us humans to have the spaces to make things more readable. It is recommended to indent sub-elements of a page with a set amount of space so you can easily see in a glance where things fall in your page hierarchy. Run webgeno and reload your browser. You will notice that there is now a link in the main page to the sub-page. It uses the page title as the text for the link. Clicking on the link will bring you to the new sub-page. Now that we have a hierarchy of pages we can add a "summary" element to a page. Summary elements (ie. <summary></summary>) look a lot like paragraph elements. Like paragraph elements they don't have any attributes and all their text lies between the start and the end tags. If you add a summary element to a page, the text within the summary element will get added on the parent page (describing the link) and to the actual page (usually placed at the top). Try adding a summary element to your sub-page and see what it looks like.
Sections...
relative_link's and a's...
news and highlights...
ul and li...
sitemap...
images...
? br, center, hr...
Now you know the basics about adding the content of your site. The next thing to do is to change the visuals of the site to reflect your sytle. For basic alterations you will need to know about CSS (references...). For advanced styling you'll need to know about HTML (references ...).
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Highlights
- Checkout all the different "flavors" that this site comes in on the templates page
- See the automatically generated site map
Recent News
- January 19, 2009
Released version 5.1 - November 28, 2008
Released version 4.3 - November 19, 2008
Released version 3.9: note that data files from previous releases are not compatible - October 30, 2008
Added support for libxml2 - September 10, 2008
Released version 3.5