The overall process

Manypage is used inside a web site production workflow

First, information is collected by the editorial team wich write simple HTML pages. They think about the hierarchy of theses pages that will become the browsing tree. At this stage, is it important to notice that the browsing tree can be different from the way pages are stored in directories. The browsing tree deal with the way the websurfer get to the information. The directory tree is connected to the way the editorial team (or the company), is organised, and the way the information is managed. It is sometime difficult but really consequential to have people from an organisation to understand that the visible web site hierarchy should not always reflect the organisation hierarchy.

To complement this information, the technical and graphic team has prepared menu and graphical elements and has described the organisation of these components into template and object files. Those components that will be added to pages are very important to help the websurfer to use your site. It is why we give you some examples of what you could put in your dressing...

All that information (plain HTML files, images and multimedia files, description of browsing trees in .link files, description of templates in .dress files and descriptions of object in .obj files) is placed in place in a directoy that we usually call 'Src' ( from 'Source' because it contains all what is necessary to build the web site).

Then ManyPage can be run for one or more HTML file, a directory or a subdirectory, or even all the web site. A feedback is then possible. All the produced web page are available in a second directory called 'Docs' (the historical default NCSA httpd directory).

And only when everything is right, the dressed HTML pages are published (pushed in the server directory).

It is our advice to manage the production of the site (Src and Docs directory) on a machine and the publishing (web server) on another machine.

 

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Note / example:

Two different trees : Imagine a company with 4 main departments, but where only 2 of them should sell products. The all 4 departments should be abble to put information in a directory at the root level of the web site. But from the Home Page, only the first two should be available in one click. There could be a little link to an "other services" page wich could point to the two others departement or still something else. But here, the browsing tree, the link hierarchy, is different from the directory organisation.