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Quickstart with XMLmind

For all users, XMLmind is a cross platform way to edit your webgeno site.

XMLmind can be found at www.xmlmind.com

Here's a screenshot of XMLmind viewing the default website.xml file.

The first thing to do in customizing the site for your purposes is to change the values of the "attributes" of the "website element" to describe your own website. In XMLmind elements appear with little red pyramids next to them and attributes appear as entries in a blue table. Ignore the xmlns, xmlns:xsi, and xsi:schemaLocation attributes. These values should not be changed. Looking at the root website element, the 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. Select the website element (this puts a red box around it).

Then change the values of the attributes in the attribute editor pane (on the right side of the screen) to describe your site. Make sure the "Attributes" tab is selected or you won't see the attributes for the website element. Save the file and then run webgeno.bat 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.

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. It cannot contain spaces or other strange characters that aren't allowed in file names. 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. Otherwise your main index.html page will redirect to the wrong place. The last thing to do is to change the text in the paragraph element. This is where the content of the site resides. Replace the text that's currently there with some of your own content. Save the file, close your browser and run webcleano.bat. This will clean up the directory with the old name. Rerun webgeno and reopen the index.html file. Note the difference due to your changes.

Within a page you can create as many paragraphs as you want. To create a new paragraph in our current page, highlight the current paragraph element in the tree view and click on the "Insert After" button in the insertion pane (alternatively you can use the context menu, the Edit menu, or Ctrl-J). XMLmind will list (in the insertion pane) the valid elements for a page. Click on the paragraph element and then fill in the text for the new paragraph.

Similar to creating a new paragraph, you can create a new page by inserting a new page element. Click on the current page element in the tree view and "insert after" as above. You'll notice that a page is the only valid element for this place in the tree. As soon as you add the page, you'll see that the id attribute is automatically defined with values of "???". We will have to fix this before we try running webgeno on the site. Choose the id attribute and give it a unique value (different than any of your other pages). Change any other page attributes that you deem appropriate.

Paragraphs inside of paragraphs don't make sense, but pages within page do. Creating pages within pages will define the hierarchy of your site. To create a page within a page, select an element within the parent page and insert (before or after) as we did above. Run webgeno and reload your browser. You will notice that there is now a link in the main page to the sub-page. How it appears will depend on where you inserted the sub-page in the parent page. If you inserted the link in a place where only inline elements are allowed (like paragraphs) then the link will be some inline text. Otherwise the link will appear as a heading on its own line. Clicking on the link will bring you to the new sub-page. Now that we have a hierarchy of pages it makes sense to add a "summary" element to a page. Summary elements are similar to paragraph elements in that they don't have any attributes and allow only inline elements. If you add a summary element to a page, the text within the summary element will get added on the parent page (unless it's inline) describing the sub-page and to the actual page (usually placed at the top). Add a summary element to your sub-page and see what it looks like.

Try adding some other elements to your pages. Figure out where you want to put your new content and then try to insert and see what types of elements are available to you.

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