mowyw.1.txt

MOWYW(1)
========
Moritz Lenz <moritz@faui2k3.org>


NAME
----
mowyw - Offline content management system

SYNOPSIS
--------
 - *mowyw* 
 - *mowyw* `--make --source-prefix sp --destination-prefix dp --menu-prefix mp
           --includes-prefix=ip --postifx=.html --quiet`

DESCRIPTION
-----------
mowyw is a text processor for building static websites. It supports includes,
menus, external datasources (like XML files or databases) and syntax
hilighting.

To use mowyw you need three directories called *source*, *online* and
*includes*. `source` holds the source files that are to be interpreted by
mowyw. When you run mowyw, it will walk (recursively) through the source dir,
and for each file it either copies it verbatimely to `online`, or, if the file
looks like HTML (ends on .html, .shtml, .htm etc.) it is processed by mowyw,
and the output is written into the online dir.

In `includes/` are include files (how surprising), header, footer, global
include files, and optionally data source files.

You should always execute mowyw from the parent directory of these three
directories.

The name of these three directories can be overridden with command line
options.

COMMAND LINE OPTIONS
--------------------

 * `--make`
   Only process files with a newer timestamp than the corresponding `online/'
   file.
 * `--quiet`
   Don't produce diagnostics or progress output
 * `--postfix`
   Append the given postfix to the filename of all included file names (and
   menu files). Defaults to the empty string.
 * `--includes-prefix`
   Change the search path for include files. Defaults to `includes/'.
 * `--menu-prefix`
   Change the search for menu files. Defaults to `includes/menu-`.
 * `--destination-prefix`
   Change the path for the output files. Defaults to `online/'.
 * `--source-prefix`
   Change the search path for source files. Defaults to `source/'. Must be a
   directory.
 * `--encoding`
   Interpret all input files to have that encoding. Defaults to UTF-8.
   (Conjecture: should default to the current locale... what to do?).

All options except `--make` can be specified in a config file, with more
customization options.

PROCESSING ORDER
----------------
mowyw processes files in several steps:

 * The file *mowyw.conf* is read (if it exists)
 * The source directory is traversed
 * For all source file that is actually processed
    - the file *includes/global* is read, if it exists
    - the current file is read, all markup is processed
    - the file *includes/header* is processed and prepended to the current
      output file
    - the file *includes/footer* is processed and appended to the current
      output file

MARKUP
------
Normal text (including HTML markup) is copied verbatimely to the output file.

Special directives are delimited either with `[% ... %]` (preferred) or with
`[[[ ... ]]]` (deprecated, but still supported for compatibility). 

Many elements take options, which are usually whitespace delimited, for
example `[% include includefile.html %]`.

Inline elements consist only of one tag, while block elements run until the
matching end tag. 

The following inline elements are supported:

 * `include` includes a file, and processes it. Example: `[% include
   coypright.html %]`.
 * `menu` refers to a menu. See section <<menu,MENUES>> below.
 * `item` defines a menu item. See section <<menu,MENUES>> below.
 * `option` sets an option, for example `[% option no-header %]`. See section
    <<options,OPTIONS>> below.
 * `comment` ignores everything up to the tag end. Example: `[% comment this
    comments appears nowhere in the output %]`.
 * `setvar` sets a variable. Example: `[% setvar title Title of this page%]`.
 * `readvar` reads and outputs a variable. You can optionally specify an
    escape mechanism. Example: `<h1>[% readvar title %]</h1>` or `[% readvar
    db.column escape:html %]`.
 * `bind` binds a variable to a datasource. See section <<datasource,DATA
   SOURCES>> below.


The following block elements are supported:

 * `verbatim` reads the file until it finds an `endverbatim` tag. It expects a
   marker, which must be present at the end tag as well. Everything inbetween
   is taken verbatimly, i.e. it is not processed at all. Keywords are not
   allowed as markers. Example: 
   `[% verbatim foo %] Some [% non-processed %] markup [% endverbatim foo %]`
 * `syntax` uses vim(1) to do syntax hilighting. Expects the name of the
   language or configuration as its only argument. Example: `<pre>[%syntax
   perl%]print "Hello, world\n";[%endsyntax%]</pre>`. The pseudo-syntax
   `escape` HTML-escapes the string and doesn't to any other syntax
   hilighting.
 * `for` iterates of a datasource. See section <<datasource,DATA SOURCES>> 
   below.
 * `ifvar` executes the block only if the variable is defined.
    Example: `[% ifvar title %]<h1>[%readvar title%]</h1>[% endifvar %]`.
   
[[menu]]
MENUES
------
mowyw has special menu support. To define a menu named `foo`, create a file
`source/menu-foo` with the following contents:

   <h2>Your menu title</h2>
   <ul>
       [% item home  <li><a {{class="active"}} href="/">Home</a></li>       %]
       [% item first <li><a {{class="active"}} href="/first">First</a></li> %]
       [% item sec   <li><a {{class="active"}} href="/sec/">First</a> 
           {{
                [% comment this is a sub menu that will only be visible
                    inside the `sec' menu                     %]
                [% item subitem1 <p>More menu markup</p>      %]
                [% item subitem2 <p>Even more menu markup</p> %]
           }}
       </li>   %]
   </ul>

Now in your index page you can include that menu with the directive 
`[% menu home %]`. This will produce the menu contents with the markup
stripped, and insde the `home` all of the contents will appear, the other menu
items only contribute the parts that are *not* enclosed in double curly
braces.

Menus can ben nested, a nested menu entry can be accessed for example with
`[% menu sec subitem1 %]`.

It's best to take a look at the examples in the distribution, which should
nicely illustrate the menu mechanism.


[[syntax_hilight]]
SYNTAX HILIGHTING
-----------------
Syntax hilighting requires http://www.vim.org/[vim] and
http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Text::VimColor[Text::VimColor] to be installed
(otherwise the code is just HTML escaped, not hilighted).

Since you can't tell vim which encoding a source file is in,
non-ASCII-characters might not survive the round trip to vim if the locales
don't fit. On my systems UTF-8 locales worked, everything else didn't. So use
with caution.

[[options]]
OPTIONS
-------
Currently only two options are supported, `no-header` and `no-footer`.
If they are set in a file via `[% option no-header %]`, the inclusion of
header or footer files will be omitted.


DATA SOURCES
------------
[[datasource]]
You can access external data sources by first `bind`'ing a variable to a
data source, and then iterating with a `for` loop over that source.

This is best illustrated with a short example.

File `includes/news.xml`:
        
    <rootTag>
        <item>
            <headline>China buys Google</headline>
            <status>April's fool joke</stoke>
            <date>2007</date>
        </item>
        <item>
            <headline>Perl and Python join forces: Larry Wall and Guido von
            Rossum announce 'parrot'</headline>
            <status>April's fool joke</stoke>
            <date>Very old</date>
        </item>
    </rootTag>

Now you can access the contents of this XML file in your source files:

    [% bind news_variable type:xml file:news.xml root:item %]
    [% comment and iterate over news_variable %]
    [% for i in news_variable %]
        <h2>Breaking news: [% readvar i.headline %]</h2>
        <p>Status: [% readvar i.status %]</p>
    [% endfor %]

Data sources are handled via plugins. Currently XML and DBI are supported.

The XML source is explained by the example above. The only additional option
is 'limit', which can be set to a positive number and which limits the number
of iterations. This plugin is quite limited in that the file structure always
has be the
same: one root tag that contains a list of secondary tags, each of which many
only contain distinct tags. Nested tags might work, but aren't officially
supported.

DBI is perls generic database interface. You can use it to access a database.
This has some limitations, for example you can't reuse database connections,
so every `bind` statement actually opens a database connection on its own.

For the brave, here is an example of how to use it:

    [% bind my_db type:dbi dsn:DBI:mysql:database=yourdatabse;host=dbhost
       username:your_db_user password:you_db_password encoding:latin1
       sql:'SELECT headline, status FROM news LIMIT 10'
    %]
    [% for i in my_db %]
        <h2>Breaking news: [% readvar i.headline escape:html %]</h2>
        <p>Status: [% readvar i.status escape:html %]</p>
    [% endfor %]

The options are as follows:

 * The `dsn` option is the "data source name" that `DBI`'s `connect` method
   accepts. It always starts with `DBI:`, then followed by the driver name
   like `mysql` or `Pg` (for Postgres) and the driver options.
 * The `encoding` option is optional and defaults to `utf-8`. You can use 
   any character encoding here that Perl's cool `Encode` module supports,
   which is quite a many.
 * the `password` and `username` options can be omitted if your database
   doesn't ask for them

This plugin may seem weird if you don't know Perl and its database module. If
that's the case, consider toying around with Perl and DBI first (it's really
worth a try).

CONFIGURATION FILE
------------------
[[config]]
Mowyw tries to read a file called `mowyw.conf`. Within that file you can
configure include pathes and file names on a per-file base, and you can
specify which files should be processed.

An example config file might look like this:

    MATCH[german]    = \.de
    POSTFIX[german]  = .de
    MATCH[english]   = \.en
    POSTFIX[english] = .en

    INCLUDE[10]      = \.xhtml$
    EXCLUDE[50]      = _private

The first part defines two sections called "german" and "english". 
If a file matches the
regular expression `\.de`, it is treated as being in section "german". All
include files will have the postfix '.de', which means that if a file is
called `source/index.html.de`, the header file will be `includes/header.de`, a
menu `foo` will be searched for in file `includes/menu-foo.de` etc.

This configuration mechanism is primarily intented for creating mutilingual
sites, but might be useful for other things as well.

The second part consists of `INCLUDE` and `EXCLUDE` statements with their
priority and the regex they match. Higher priority rules are tested first.
When a rule matches the file is either processed (in the case of an `INCLUDE`
option) or just verbatimly copied (in case of an `EXCLUDE` option). 

Due to an limition of the module that reads the config file
(http://search.cpan.org?Config::File[Config::File]) the
only way to specify rules with the same priority is to prefix them with
distinct strings:

    INCLUDE[a5] = foo
    INCLUDE[b5] = bar

is equivalent to
    
    INCLUDE[5]  = foo|bar

Don't give `INCLUDE` and `EXCLUDE`-options with the same priority, the
behaviour in that case is undefined.

RESOURCES
---------

If something isn't clear to you, please take a look into the  `README` file
and the examples in the source tarball. If that doesn't answer your questions,
don't hesitate to contact the author.

The official website can be found here:
http://perlgeek.de/en/software/mowyw[Mowyw homepage].

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS
--------------------
mowyw was written to get its author's job done, and it does that well. While
it was written with generality in mind, there are still some restrictions that
were accepted as a tradeoff for simplicity.

 * Error messages aren't very useful for the uninitiated, though the line
   number makes it pretty obvious where to search for for the error.
 * Disk space: mowyw keeps two complete copies of a project on disk, the
   source files and the resulting online files. This might not be optimal, and
   consumes unnecessary space for files that are not processed anyway.
 * Memory: mowyw is written in Perl, which is not know to be terribly memory
   efficient. Additionally it slurps the files into memory before parsing,
   which isn't terribly efficient either. But it's simple, and if it's not
   enough for you, go get a bigger machine (or contribute a stream tokenizer
    and parser).
 * There are some limitations due to multi-pass parsing. For example you can't
   include the string `%]` in SQL statements, because it is considered to be a
   tag closer by the lexer. A future rewrite might change that.


AUTHOR
------

Written by http://perlgeek.de/[Moritz Lenz], mailto:moritz@faui2k3.org[].

COPYRIGHT 
---------

Copyright 2006 - 2009 by Moritz Lenz.

This is free software.  You may redistribute copies  of  it  under  the terms
of the Artistic License 2 as published by The Perl Foundation.

(If this license is not permissive enough for you, please contact the author).

There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.