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AIXtm mtXIA
Technical Consulting Group
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menugen9_k93- HTML Look-and-feel navigation generator - Mt Xia: Technical Consulting Group |
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"menugen" provides the user with the ability to easily maintain and modify groups of web pages. This program creates a standard "look-and-feel" for user supplied WWW content using server side includes. It therefore assumes the web server, where these pages will be offered, supports server side includes. To use "menugen", the user should create content and store it in files called "XXXXXXXX.content.shtml", where XXXXXXXX is some prefix file name defined by the user. "menugen" creates menus, links, headers, titles, footers, contact info links, etc, based on information stored in a user defined relationship file. The relationship file is assumed to be in the same directory with the "XXXXXXXX.content.shtml" files and is called "menugen.dat". "menugen" allows users to modify the "look-and-feel" of all files in a directory by storing configuration information such as colors, font sizes, title info, etc in a file called "menugen.cfg". The "-c" option will create a file called "menugen.cfg" if it does not already exist. If it does exist it will not overwrite it. To recreate the "menugen.cfg" file, you will first have to remove it. The "menugen.cfg" file contains user modifiable parameters such as font colors, font sizes background color, title and contact information. One of the values defined in the "menugen.cfg" file is called "THEME". This is a title which is displayed at the top of every page. The title can be a two part title separated by a colon (:). The part of the title to the left of the colon will be displayed in a larger text. The part of the title to the right of the colon will be displayed in italics and a smaller text. All values in the configuration file may be changed to suit the users particular needs. The "menugen.cfg" file MUST be executeable. The "menugen" program creates a menu file for each page which contains the relationships between each page, its parent page, and its child pages. The links displayed on the menu by default are that of the parent and children of each page. The "-g" option causes the grandchildren of each page to also be included in the menu. Normally, if the static menu bar file exists, it is not overwritten in order to preserve any user customization of that file. However the "-S" option will cause the static menubar file to be overwritten with the default values. The static menu bar file is "staticbar.shtml". The datafile describes the relationships between all the web pages in the current directory. The relationship between the pages is maintained via parent/child references. By default the relationships are read from a file called "menugen.dat" in the current directory. The "-f" option allows the user to specify a different file name. The datafile has the following format: PARENT<tab>CURRENT<tab>SHORT DESCRIPTION PARENT and CURRENT are file name prefixes and are usually limited to 8 characters or less. TAB characters between the fields is mandatory. PARENT is the parent of the CURRENT page. The SHORT DESCRIPTION is a description of the CURRENT page. An example of datafile would be:
In this example, the page "index" has three child pages called "child1", "child2", and "child3". The menu on the "index" page would reference these three pages. The page "child1" has four child pages called "child11", "child12", "child13", "child14". The menu on the "child1" page would reference these four pages. And so on for child pages "child2" and "child3". The "-h" option displays this help file and is assumed to reside in the file called "/usr/local/sh/README.menugen". Most graphical web browsers will show hypertext links as underlined text of a different color than normal text. When this program creates the menu bars, the links are configured NOT to have underlines. If you want The links in the menu bars to have underlines, use the "-u" option. |
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For information regarding this page, contact
Dana French ( dfrench@mtxia.com )
Copyright 2008 by Mt Xia Inc, All Rights Reserved