Up and Running with Frontier Web Site Management
by Matt Neuburg
Author of the book Frontier: The Definitive Guide
Frontier has features that uniquely qualify it to act as a powerful and effective Web site management tool.The most important of these is that Frontier is completely programmable. It comes with its own fast, powerful internal scripting language (called "UserTalk"). This means that you can modify and extend Frontier's behavior to get "smart" HTML effects automatically.
Suppose, for example, your site consists of three Web pages: let's call them "Manny", "Moe", and "Jack". Let's say that the way you want navigation to work is that each page should start and end with explicit links to the other two: so, "Manny" will have links that say (and lead to) "Moe" and "Jack", while "Moe" will have links that say "Manny" and "Jack", and so on.
You could implement this by hand; but you might make a mistake, and, much more important, if you add a fourth page, and then a fifth page, the job becomes very daunting.
But it isn't a job that really requires any brains, is it? There's a mathematical formula, as it were, involved here: you simply want every page to contain links to all the other pages and not to itself. That's the kind of thing computers are good at.
Frontier doesn't come configured out of the box ready to give your pages this functionality by the simple choice of a menu item, but it is not difficult, writing in the UserTalk language, to give it this functionality.
Incidentally, if you want to see this sort of thing in action, take a look the "typical Frontier site" I've posted. If you're interested in how the structural effects there are accomplished, you can download the site table and examine it with Frontier. The site is at:
http://www.tidbits.com/matt/typical.htmlBut since that site is rather advanced, you shouldn't download it until you've studied this tutorial!
The point is that as soon as you want a scriptable effect like the one I've just described, Frontier will be there for you. Because you can program Frontier, it can grow with your needs.
In this tutorial, though, you won't learn much about scripting Frontier with UserTalk. In fact, you won't learn anything about it! That's because Frontier comes already set up for you to start managing your Web site.The reason for this is that somebody else has already programmed Frontier for you. Virtually all the Web site management features that we'll be learning to use in this tutorial are actually just UserTalk scripts. (A few core routines have been recoded and compiled to give some extra speed, but even this was done only after they had been fully worked out in UserTalk.)
That's a good indication, right there, of the power of Frontier scripting with UserTalk. Frontier didn't start out as a Web site tool: it started out as a scripting tool. But since Frontier can drive itself, can generate textfiles, and can open files and perform other system-level operations, it was natural and straightforward to adapt Frontier as a Web site tool.
Since Frontier is also an open system, you'll actually be able to look at the scripts that do this -- the scripts that respond when you choose menu items inside Frontier.
Here are some more reasons for using Frontier to manage your Web site:
In short, Frontier is a fully programmable command-center where you store and access information and from which you control your computer. Making Web sites is only one way to put Frontier to work, one instance of the many kinds of thing it can do.
- Frontier is a database.
This database is capable of storing anything. Therefore, all the basic material for your entire site -- HTML, pictures, whatever -- can live inside Frontier.
- Frontier is an editor.
It can edit text. It can also edit "outlines", a very useful format for structuring HTML, and one which Frontier uses in powerful ways to help you maintain your Web pages. So you not only store your site's material in Frontier; you can work on it there, too.
- Frontier can drive other applications -- including your computer's system.
Frontier thus acts as a kind of command center for mustering the resources you use as you work on your Web site. So, it doesn't have to be able to do everything itself, because it knows how to tell other applications to do it.
For instance, Frontier doesn't need to have any HTML WYSIWYG capacities of its own. Because it can drive the system, Frontier can read and create files. So it can make an HTML file. Because it can drive other applications, Frontier can then tell your Web browser to open that file to show you how it looks when formatted.
So while other Web site management tools can be bloated and complicated, Frontier stays lean and mean.
- Frontier gives you full control.
You are ultimately in charge of precisely what HTML Frontier generates. Unlike a WYSIWYG Web page editing program, where you see the visual interface and have no precise idea what the final HTML will be like, Frontier allows you (and expects you) to work directly with HTML.
To be sure, Frontier can generate some HTML automatically; that's the whole point of Frontier's Web site management. But you are still in charge of whether and how it does this. You can inspect Frontier's UserTalk scripts to see exactly what it does, and you can write customized scripts of your own to generate automatic HTML in some completely new way if you like.
Does that sound daunting? It shouldn't! Thanks to the scripts already included with Frontier, just by choosing a few menu items, you'll be able to manage Web sites of any size right away. That's what this tutorial is all about.
Enough talk about Frontier; let's get to the hands-on part of this tutorial and begin actually using Frontier!
All text is by Matt Neuburg, phd, matt@tidbits.com.
For information about the book Frontier: The Definitive Guide, see my home page:
http://www.tidbits.com/matt
All text copyright Matt Neuburg, 1997 and 1998. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No one else has any right to copy or reproduce in
any form, including electronic. You may download this material but you may not post it for others to
see or distribute it to others without explicit permission from the author.
Downloadable versions at http://www.ojai.net/matt/downloads/webTutorial.hqx and http://www.ojai.net/matt/downloads/webTutorial.zip.
Please do not confuse this tutorial with a certain other Frontier 5 tutorial based upon my earlier work.
This page created with
Frontier, 2/11/2000; 7:00:04 PM.