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Web Templating

Here is yet another way of creating web content

Is there room for another web templating system? I think so.

I wanted to have a system whose templates looked like HTML, with a minimum number of extra tags.

I wanted to be able to have pages built by a graphics person using a package like Macromedia Dreamweaver, with minimal need to hack on the HTML directly. I wanted to separate page styling and page engineering, bringing them together when output is requested

I wanted to be able to use more or less any web server - OK, OK, I wanted to use Apache but not be totally tied to it.

Web Templating owes a lot to the Ars Digita Community System (ACS) and the ArsDigita Templating System. These are excellent systems and if you are prepared to use AOLServer or an AOLServer emulator I'd say go for them. Having said that - I wanted to make something simple which could run as a CGI script.

I'm working on adding WT functionality to TclHttpd, with assistance from Brent Welch.

You can download it from here.

How does it work?

This is the simple way. See later for more complex stuff.

Install the package.
Put the appearance part of your web page in a file, let's say sample.wtml.
Dynamic stuff which is instantiated on display goes between @....@.
If you want to have repeated blocks use

<repeat>.....</repeat>

Conditional stuff goes between

<if>...</if>

You can use a shared (and arbitrarily deep) set of master templates with

<master name=xxxx>

Put the data-creating part of your web page in another file, let's say sample.tcl (the basename should be the same).
Set the dynamic data into a tcl array, e.g.

set pagevars(stuff) "Here is some stuff."

Display the page in your browser.

OK - there are a few details missing - but really only a few. Read the manual which comes with the package.

How do I do more complex stuff?

Import the Web Templating package into a Tcl script:

package require WebTemplate

Run the script as a CGI program.

Last updated 28 January, 2001