Welcome to WebMake

WebMake is a simple content management system, based around a templating system for HTML documents and an emphasis on page generation.

What makes it different from the many other templating engines out there, is that it's been designed to have lots of built-in smarts about what a "typical" informational website needs in the way of functionality: metadata support, dynamic index generation from metadata, automatically-generated sitemaps and navigational aids, user-defined tags, and support for non-HTML input and output -- and, of course, embedded Perl code. ;)

It's written in Perl, and is distributed under the GPL.

• Creates portable sites: It requires no dynamic scripting capabilities on the server; WebMake sites can be deployed to a plain old FTP site without any problems.

• No need to edit lots of files: A multi-level website can be generated entirely from 1 WebMake file containing content, links to content files, perl code (if needed), and output instructions.

• Efficient: WebMake supports dependency checking, so a one-line change to one source file will not regenerate your entire site -- unless it's supposed to. Only the files that refer to that chunk of content, however indirectly, will be modified.

• Supports content conversion, on the fly: Text can be edited as standard HTML, converted from plain text (see below), or converted from any other format by adding a conversion method to the WebMake::FormatConvert module.

• Edit text as text, not as HTML: One of the built-in content conversion modules is Text::EtText, which provides an easy-to-edit, easy-to-read and intuitive way to write HTML, based on the plain-text markup conventions we've been using for years.

• Scriptable: Content items and output URLs can be generated, altered, or read in dynamically using perl code. Perl code can even be used to generate other perl code to generate content/output URLs/etc., recursively. New tags can be defined and interpreted in perl.

• Extensible: New tags (for use in content items or in the WebMake file itself) can be added from perl code, providing what amounts to a dynamically-loaded plugin API.

• Edit content in your web browser: WebMake now includes webmake.cgi, which provides a CGI front-end to editing and managing a WebMake site. Screenshots here.

• Site replication: with webmake.cgi's CVS integration, multiple copies of the same site can be replicated, and changes made on any of the sites will be automatically replicated to all the others.

• Version control: changes made to sites using webmake.cgi will be kept under CVS version control, so older versions of the site can be "rolled back" if necessary.