File::MultiCat version 0.04

A very simple concatenating website preprocessor/ multiple file concatenator.

INSTALLATION

To install this module type the following:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

DEPENDENCIES

This module requires these other modules and libraries:

strict
warnings

.......which you very probably already have if you have Perl.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Copyright (C) 2004 Michael B. Stevens. All rights reserved. This is free software, and may be
destributed under terms of the Gnu Public License.

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WHY PREPROCESSING?

Usually, many pages on a website contain common elements, (menus, logos, headers, footers, document type definition, and links to a common CSS file).

You can cope with this by using cut-and-paste with a text editor, by using SSI (server side includes), or by generating the pages with a server side language like Perl or PHP. I generate a lot of pages on my sites with Perl as a server side language, but also find preprocessing extremely useful.

Another reason to preprocess is to
avoid having to use html frames.
Frames are usually a bad idea.
Why? See:
http://www.html-faq.com/htmlframes/?framesareevil http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html This suite is a good tool to help remove old framed sites from thir frames.

Preprocessing a website is easy, and allows you to change the look and content of a whole site easily. Here are the steps:

  1. Create text files that will be combined to make the pages. This is the part that takes a bit of thought: Exactly where do I want to split these files so that when they are combined they will make a valid HTML or XHTML page?
  2. Run a preprocessor scripts over these text files to create finished HTML or XHTML files.
  3. Upload the newly changed (X)HTML files to your web space while you go drink a cup of coffee and give yourself a big pat on the back.

It's all very easy and quick, and you can do the whole thing again tomorrow if you have a new idea about how the site should fit together.

This module differs from other preprocessors in that it does not use an internal macro language in the file it processes. Instead, it builds files from other files, as you will see below.

HOW TO USE THIS MODULE

Add the line:

use File::MultiCat

...to use the MultiCat module.

Make the text files to combine, and then write a text file (defaults to multicat.dat) showing how to combine them. This is easy. Here is an example:

xhtmlTrans.txt menu.txt mid0.txt bottom.txt x0.html xhtmlTrans.txt menu.txt mid1.txt bottom.txt x1.html xhtmlTrans.txt menu.txt mid2.txt bottom.txt x2.html xhtmlTrans.txt menu.txt mid3.txt bottom.txt x3.html xhtmlTrans.txt menu.txt mid4.txt bottom.txt x4.html html4.txt.txt menu.txt mid5.txt bottom.txt x5.html html4.txt.txt menu.txt mid6.txt bottom.txt x6.html

On each line of the example, the last filename is the output file. All the other files named on the line are combined (concatenated), in
the order they appear, to make this final file.

Common menus, footers, and the like can be used for different pages easily.

NEW in 0.04: You can now have comments in the site description file. Comments start with the start ('#') character, just as in most 'nix configuration files.

Be sure to look at the example 'xot' site description file to get all the gory details.

You can name the site description file anything you want. If you name it 'xot' then the call would be:

my $ob = File::MultiCat->new();
$ob->multicat('xot');

If you call mcat.pl without a file (or the complete path to a file), the script will look for the default

multicat.dat

...in your working
directory.

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CONTACT
webmaster@mbstevens.com http://www.mbstevens.com/preprocessor/index.html (...where you can find a similar, non-module, script version and a different macro-preprocessing script in the same package.)

I hope you find the tiny module useful. If you find new uses for it in addition to preprocessing web pages, let me know! If you're writing a more sophisticated preprocessor, say one that incorporates a macro language, you can add this module's non-macro preprocessor with 3 lines of code plus your site description file.

Cheers,
Michael B. Stevens