My Website : Home

This Is My Website

This page's vital information:

Physical location: ./pages/Home.php & ./pages/Home.html & ./pages/Home Footer.html
Link here with: <a href="?page=Home">

Congratulations - you have successfully installed GavsWorld Website Template, written by Gavin Cameron. Now please browse around this demo site for full instructions on how to use the software.

What is this package?

This software began life purely to fulfil the needs of GavsWorld (and the rest of my websites). However, several people asked if they could get the software for use on their own website. I obliged and made the software more generic and customisable.

So the result is a package which is perfectly usable, however may be doing things in peculiar ways - this is purely due to the original use. It all makes sense when you read this documentation though :-)

Why use this package?

Anybody can use an html page creator for creating websites, however the chances are that the generated pages may not all have a consistent look and feel about them. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) help but then you may just end up with a static web site, i.e. that only ever changes when you update it. And then when you do update, you will no doubt have to update any menus or page lists that you have, to pick up the newly created pages. Your other alternative is to go with a combersome database system.

This software provides a framework for automatically finding page content, populating page lists, showing what has been updated, allowing for nested page lists (i.e. sub-pages within pages in the list that only appear when the top level page is selected) and selectable style sheets to ensure page consistency. All you need to provide is a simple web page with no style attributes (unless defining your own "extra" styles).

Your content is not limited to static pages, you can write PHP to create active web pages within this framework. Just check out my Real Ale Ratings at GavsWorld.net to see it in action.

An important note is that this software uses XHTML which differs slightly from HTML, so you should familiarise yourself with the differences. Try to write valid code, as currently the website conforms to W3C coding standards (click the buttons at the bottom of the page list to re-validate pages).

The intention is that you should never have to alter the actual software that drives the site (unless making up your own), but rather that you create just the content of the pages.

The only bit of software you will want to modify is the <setup.php> file which allow you to customise things like:

Page title and tag line
Author's name
Company name (if applicable)
What pages are displayed in the top menu
The e-mail contact of the website
What web sites are displayed in the side panel
etc.

The software itself will create the web page that you are looking at, with all of its headers, footers and the category / page list at the side. All that you, the end user, will create is the page body.

At the top of each of these demo pages is where the file physically exists and how you would link to it from any other page that you write.

The most important point to grasp with this software is the directory structure. Why is this so important? Well, since this software does not use a database as its back end for storing all of your pages (for speed and simplicity), it must follow strict rules to search for web content.

After that, the next important thing is how to link to pages from any other page that you create.

So, those are a couple of starting places to learn how to use this software. So start exploring :-)

Note that this page (called "Home" and linked to with "?page=Home") is generated from 2 files: Home.php is the page called by the software (according to the order of precedence rules described else where), but that itself then calls up Home.html. This allows you to have a static content that is easily modifiable. The reason for the PHP is to display the latest news item at the bottom of the page. If you don't want this News feed, simply remove Home.php.

If you then want a footer section of the page (see GavsWorld for an example), then you can have an optional file called <./pages/Home Footer.html> that will be displayed after Home.html and the latest News item.

What this package is not

This package is not an all singing, all dancing, do no work at all to knock up your own website type of package. If you want that sort of thing, then I'd suggest something like WordPress.

What this package needs to operate

This software has to run on a web server - I'd recommend apache which is incredibly easy to install on any Linux distribution (normally a few mouse clicks in the package manager) and FREE. It also needs the PHP module for apache since this interprets the software and produces the web pages. For anyone unlucky enough to be stuck with some operating system from the empire of Mr Gates, a colleague, Bruce found this gem of a tutorial to help you out with installing it on Vista. I've not tried it myself, but he said it is a simple step-by-step guide.

Latest News

2021-12-29 : Website Template Updated : v2.23.2

permalink

Enhancements

None

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

None

Bug Fixes

The permalinks for the news feed only worked if the website was in the document root. Now takes into account the path.

Home Page Footer

This is a special file only ever called when the Home page is visited and only if it exists (obviously).

You would normally display banners etc. in this section, i.e. after your main page content and after the latest news item.

If you don't want it, then simply delete it.

A quick Summary - as this seems like a sensible place for it

All the donkey work of automatically finding your pages to produce the page listing in the opposite panel has been done for you. You also get a few pages (PHP based software) for free:

* although you still have to write the news items obviously!

But at the end of the day, you still have to produce the XHTML content. That said however ... it's not exactly rocket science and this template tutorial website should help you out :-)