Simple Website Software 0.99

Simple Website Software (SWS) is my attempt to provide software to generate a reasonably modern looking web site while requiring a minimal amount of effort to set up, yet keeping the HTML pages independent so they can be easily editted and verified outside the web site.
SWS requires PHP version 4.1 or above and consists of only a small number of files. It uses cascading style sheets (CSS) to control the basic look and feel and has the basic layout, but not appearance) of that shown to the left. If you want a web site which has different components than those you see here, SWS is not for you.
There are only a few components to your basic SWS web page:
1. Banner - an optional box across the top of the page. This is provided as a file containing a fragment of HTML.
2. Left hand menus - a required set of links organized in one or more blocks. Each block has a title and consists of zero or more static links. This is provided as a file containing partial HTML address tags.
3. Middle - is where the basic HTML you provide is shown. This is provided as a file which is often named similar to your PHP program.
4. Right hand menus - an optional set of links, similar to those on the left hand side.
5. Footer - generated HTML which shows a copyright and date for each page of HTML.
Main features:
- SWS pages are rended quite fast by your PHP web server. There is no operating system dependency here - you may use a Unix (Linux) or Windows-based server. The only software requirement is that you have PHP available. You code each page in PHP, but the PHP is very simple and almost always looks the same. You dont need to be much of a PHP coder.
- SWS requires no database to render its pages.
- Any authentication uses the normal web server mechanism (e.g. .htaccess files for Unix Apache).
- Menus can be selectively displayed based on what section of the web site is being displayed. If one selects vacations, then you can show a menu of vacation links. Move elsewhere and the menu disappears.
- Menus can be selectively displayed based on whether the user is authenticated (logged in) or not. Different menu blocks can be shown to different people.
- A utility program called showfilelist.php is provided to generate simple lists of links. This program reads a simple ASCII file and generates the HTML for you keep your interface very simple.
- An entire SWS installation and setup consists of only a half dozen files, all centralized in one directory. Your basic HTML remains in HTML files so you can develope it and test it as you normally would. You only use a small PHP program to tie it all together so the pages have the correct look and feel. This keeps things easy for you to create and maintain your web site.
Enhancements:
- The release includes minor changes to make the code more compatible with PHP 5.
- There is no need to upgrade unless you are having problems.
- This software is considered stable.