The Concept of phpWebSite

How phpWebSite Works

In order to better understand how to use phpWebSite to create a web site, let's take a look at a typical site. By identifying the various elements that make up your site from a visitor's perspective, the administrative interface will make more sense once you begin using the tools.

The page pictured below represents a fairly typical phpWebSite generated web page - no doubt you have seen something like it many times when surfing the web.

A menu is in the upper left-hand corner, There is some general information site, front and center where we would expect it. Several important notices are on the site and some information is highlighted in a column on the far right of the page.

Using traditional tools like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, our approach to building a page like this would be to start placing graphics, links, and text on a "blank" page much like we would create a print document. After a bit of work, we could reproduce the page above. And we would have produced just that - a single, solitary page.

Now let's pause a moment and look at the main administrative page for phpWebSite. A few things stand out. We are looking at a web page in a browser, and the layout area common to many web page generation tools is nowhere to be found.

Instead we have a collection of icons and links. These represent the various modules that allow you to provide and manage content for your site. Unlike single-page generation tools, phpWebSite serves as a framework that dynamically organizes your content. Each page you view on your site is the work of many modules providing information that the phpWebSite engine puts together into the web page viewed by the site visitor. Let's look at that original web page again, this time showing the modules that are working together to build the page:

What we see now is that phpWebSite has gathered up and presented the information on the site based on the module used to provide it. Different modules handle different types of information. One of the keys to using phpWebSite successfully is using the right module for the right information. In the pages that follow, each module is covered in detail. The important thing to note at this point is that we manage our site by managing our content. This is why phpWebSite is frequently referred to as a "Content Management System".

You may be wondering how to control to control the layout of a page. You should note that the layout of the example given is just one of the many possible. Layout is controlled via the layout module in combination with HTML templates, both of which are covered later. Rest assured that pretty much any look and feel can be achieved - here we are just interested in 'information elements' that comprise a site.

Created on 07/26/2003 01:22 AM by RobertK
Updated on 08/10/2003 04:00 PM by RobertK