Script-based Website Maintenance

Introduction

This website shows webmasters one way to:

create valid HTML, XML and CSS;
maintain structural consistency (e.g. navigation menus; page layout) across a whole website, possibly several, even if you want to make global changes;
generate content from simple look-up tables;
maintain different language versions of a page in one file.

The method uses these:

UNIX;
GNU Make to update pages with the minimum number of commands;
GNU m4 to generate common sequences of HTML, XML, etc;
HTML Tidy to beautify the HTML, and to convert characters;
awk to process look-up tables;
sed to convert raw, preformatted text into HTML.

This website assumes you are using these tools/environments or similar, but there's nothing to stop you adapting the information to others.

I haven't maintained this site as well as it should be, so some information may be out of date. In particular, the site has not kept up with the provided software.

Summary

Check that you have the necessary tools.
Organize your files properly.
Arrange make to build the website from the files.
Fill your pages with content and mark-up, and maintain them.
Use extra features (multiple languages and look-up tables) when necessary.

Useful files

m4-1.4-quotes.diff.bz2: A patch for m4
m4-1.4-quotes-2.diff.bz2: An improved patch for m4
global.tgz: Some general files based on the macros shown
site.tgz: A very sparse website source, to get you started
webscripts-20021220.tgz: Experimental macros for total conversion from HTML to m4 — I'll describe them later
demoweb-20021218.tgz: The sparse demonstration website source, using the experimental macros