Getting Started with WebLord, the Document Assembly Tool
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The Document Assembly Tool

Getting Started With WebLord

This section presents you with an overview of the most important concepts that you need to know, as well as information on how to actually run WebLord to have it build a set of pages from the site description file.

Familiarizing Yourself with WebLord

The introduction was specifically written to give you an understanding of what WebLord does, and (in a simplified manner) how it accomplishes what it does.

The section on inheritance was written to teach you about an important object-oriented concept that is central to WebLord's operation.

The tutorial guides you through the construction of a simple, but complete web site. In the process you will learn a variety of techniques upon which you will build and expand your own ideas of accomplishing certain tasks.

If you have used WebLord before, and are familiar with it, you may merely be interested in learning what has changed since the last release, v1.2.3

Running WebLord

At the present time, WebLord is a CLI (Command Line Interface) tool. A preliminary operational GUI is in the works for v3.0, and a fully functional project management GUI, for v4.0. WebLord's multi-platform support requires us to carefully evaluate the design of the GUI for each platform. For the Amiga we believe that MUI will offer the best functionality, though we are investigating what AmigaOS 3.5 and 5.0 will have to offer and will adjust the direction of the GUI accordingly; for Unix/Linux systems we expect to use either Java or the GTK (GIMP Tool Kit). No time-frame can be given, however, as to when the GUI will become available.

WebLord accepts a number of arguments; most of these you may not need. The order of arguments on the command line is of no importance. The most important are these:

Argument Brief Description
site This is the only required arguments. The keyword 'SITE' is optional; specifies the name of the file containing the site description. To build such a site description, you should familiarize yourself with the tutorial.
page The keyword 'PAGE' is optional if your page names do not conflict with an argument keyword.
force Ensures that a page is written to a file and its post-exec property executed even if the page has not changed since the last time it was generated.
postexec Versions of WebLord before 2.0 required the use of a 'NOEXEC' keyword to suppress the evaluation and execution of the post-exec property; WebLord now requires this function to be specifically enabled.

Assuming that you have built a site description and stored it in a file named my-site.wl you would have WebLord build this site with the following command:

weblord site my-site.wl

As "my-site.wl" will not conflict with one of WebLord's arguments, you can omit the "site" keyword:

weblord my-site.wl

If you wanted to build only one page (let's say the page named "page1"):

weblord my-site.wl page1

To actually update this page only if it was changed:

weblord make my-site.wl page1

Again, the order of arguments does not matter, so long as it is clear which is which. In the case of the SITE and PAGE arguments (for which you can omit the keywords) you should understand that the first unknown argument ("my-site.wl") will be assumed to be the SITE argument; once that is known, any additional unknown arguments will be assumed to be PAGE arguments. If the distinctions are not clear, you should use the keywords explicitly.


This material is Copyright © 1997,1998,1999,2000,2001 RingLord Technologies and Udo Schuermann. All rights reserved. The latest versions of the WebLord software and (this) documentation can be obtained from the WebLord Home Page (the link will only function if you are connected to the internet.)