Hi there everyone this is my first time posting here, I am a student working for a really small company and I am in charge of developing the company's website.
Since I am only here for two more months, the boss wants to be able to change some content of the website without having to do any code.
He mentioned the idea of having an XML file he can update online, that will update the content of parts of the website. He does not want anything to do with third party websites.
So I was just wondering if this is even possible, I have no experience with XML, and really have no idea of where to start. All suggestions are welcome. Thanks in advance
Try a server-side include (SSI) with the something like the following tag:
<!--#include virtual="sitecontents/content_name_1.txt" -->
You can update the individual files (they don't necessarily have to include HTML tags) instead of trying to process an XML document. Much less development time and, frankly, much easier to maintain.
I did something similar to this for my website but used a database-driven concept. I have a secure area where I can enter in data via forms into the various database tables and then the information is automatically updated on the site via PHP. Takes awhile to get it all in place and working but has been worth the effort.
Now that I'm think about it, you can do this with XML as well. I played around with it a bit before developing the database-driven site. If you're not familiar with XML though it might be a stretch to get it done in the short time you have. You will also need to know XSLT which can be confusing at times. It is needed to connect to the XML file (data source) and then to parse the data and transform the information into something that looks good.
Related
Hello Stack Overflow Community!
I am making a directory of many thousand custom mods for a game using HTML tables. When I started this project, I thought one HTML page would be slow, but adequate for the ~4k files I was expecting. As I progressed, I realized there are tens of thousands of files I need to have in these tables, and let the user search though to find what they are missing to load up a new scenario. Each entry has about 20 text entries and a small image (~3KB). I only need to be able to search through one column.
I'm thinking of dividing the tables across several pages on my website to help loading speeds and improve overall organization. But then a user would have to navigate to each page, and perform a search there. This could take a while and be very cumbersome.
I'm not great at website programming. Can someone advise a way to allow the user to search through several web pages and tables from one location? Ideally this would jump to the location in the table on the new webpage, or maybe highlight the entry like the browser's search function does.
You can see my current setup here : https://www.loco-dat-directory.site/
Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction, as I'm quite confused now :-)
This would be my steps,
Copy all my info into an excel spredsheet, then convert that to json, then make that an array for javascript (myarray), then can make an input field, and on click an if statement if input == myarray[0].propertyName
if you want something more than an exact match, you'd need https://lodash.com/
in your project.
Hacky Solution
There is a browser tool, called TableCapture, to capture data from html tables and load into excel/spreadsheets - where you are basically deferring to spreadsheet software to manage the searching.
You would have to see if:
This type of tool would solve your problem - maybe you can pull each HTML page's contents manually, then merge these pages into a document with multiple "sheets", and then let people download the "spreadsheet" from your website.
If you do not take on the labor above and just tell other people to do it, then you'd have to see if you can teach the people how to perform the search and do this method on their own. eg. "download this plugin, use it on these pages, search"
Why your question is difficult to answer
The reason why it will be hard for people to answer you in stackoverflow.com (usually code solutions) is that you need a more complicated solution (in my opinion) than hard coded tables and html/css/javascript.
This type of situation is exactly why people use databases and APIs to accept requests ("term": "something") for information and deliver responses ( "results": [...] ).
Thank you everyone for your great advice. I wasn't aware most of these potential solutions existed, and it was good to see how other people were tackling problems of similar scope.
I've decided to go with DataTables for their built-in sorting and filtering : https://datatables.net/
I'm also going to use a javascript array with an input field on the main page to allow users to search for which pack their mod is in. This will lead them to separate pages on my site, each with a unique datatable for a mod pack. Separate pages will load up much quicker than one gigantic page trying to show everything.
I'm pretty new to this so I'm not sure if this is a simple request or not but here goes:
I am working on a school website and under each program page is a list of course codes. What I'm looking for is when I click on said course code (ex. HEL2106), to have a lightbox-type of popup that displays program info about said course code. What I have is a .dat file that has all the course codes and descriptions in it, so I would like to use some sort of HTML/CSS/JS that will pop this up and display the correct info about the clicked course from the .dat file.
I'm not 100% sure on how to go about this so if anyone has any suggestions at all, that would be really helpful.
If you need any other details from me, let me know.
Thanks,
(File Info* The .dat file is pretty much just a notepad document with each course code & description in sequence)
Just to let you know, you need to search and learn about a lot of things first.
For data access on a website, you need access to a database. If you don't know about SQL (or any other query language), Query, Database, Tables, Server ... then you should start there.
To read those databases, you need to write code (ASP.NET, PHP, etc) that runs on a web server (Apache, IIS, etc).
If you want to create a website, I recommend you start working with WordPress, Joomla or other CMS (Content Management System) for you to familiarize with a lot of things before jumping to the advance stuff.
YouTube is a very good friend and teacher! :) Start by looking some tutorials there. Hope this will guide you to what you need.
I have no idea what your level of experience is based off your question so I will assume you have a basic understanding of HTML,CSS and JS. If not, then I would recommend Exel Gamboa's answer.
It sounds like you're looking for something like http://fancybox.net/
Of course, it is typically used for displaying images but it could be easily modified for your purpose.
Now about your .dat file. When storing data for large websites, it's typically best to use SQL for databases. This allows you to access data and store it in an organized manner.
As a final recommendation I'd take a look at using a CMS for your website. (Wordpress, WolfCMS, perch, etc...)
Hope this helps.
I was wondering if anyone knew of an application that would take a GEDCOM genealogy file and convert it to HTML format for viewing and publishing on the web. I'd like to have separate html files for each individual and perhaps additional files for other content as well. I know there are some tools out there but I was wondering if anyone used any tools and could advise on this. I'm not sure what format to look for such applications. They could be Python or php files that one can edit, or even JavaScript (maybe) or just executable files.
The next issue might be appropriate for a topic in itself. Export of GEDCOM to RDF. My interest here would be to align the information with specific vocabularies, such as BIO or REL which both are extended from FOAF.
Thanks,
Bruce
Like Rob Kam said, Ged2Html was the most popular such program for a long time.
GRAMPS can also create static HTML sites and has the advantage of being free software and having a native XML format which you could easily modify to fit your needs.
Several years ago, I created a simple Java program to turn gedcom into xml. I then used xslt to generate html and rdf. The html I generate is pretty rudimentary, so it would probably be better to look elsewhere for that, but the rdf might be useful to you:
http://jay.askren.net/Projects/SemWeb/
There are a number of these. All listed at http://www.cyndislist.com/gedcom/gedcom-to-web-page-conversion/
Ged2html used to be the most popular and most versatile, but is now no longer being developed. It's an executable, with output customisable through its own scripting syntax.
Family Historian http://www.family-historian.co.uk will create exactly what you are looking for, eg one file per person using the built in Web Site creator. As will a couple of the other Major genealogy packages. I have not seen anything for the RDF part of your question.
I have since tried to produce a Genealogy application using Semantic MediaWiki - MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, and Semantic MediaWiki includes various extensions related to the Semantic Web. I thought it is very easy to use with the forms and the ability to upload a GEDCOM but some feedback from people into genealogy said that it appeared too technical and didn't seem to offer anything new.
So, now the issue is whether to stay with MediaWiki and make it more user friendly or create an entirely new application that allows for adding and updating data in a triple store as well as displaying. I'm not sure how to generate a family tree graphical view of the data, like on sites like ancestry.com, where one can click on a box to see details about the person and update that info or one could click on a right or left arrow around a box to navigate the tree. The data comes from SPARQL queries sent to the data set/triple store both when displaying the initial view and when navigating the tree, where an Ajax call is needed to get more data.
Bruce
I develop an online, Flash-based multiplayer game. It is a complex game, and requires a lot of documentation to fully explain it to our users. Ideally, I would like to find MySQL-based wiki software that can provide these editable documentation pages outside of Flash (in the HTML realm) but also within Flash for convenience, and so that players can refer to the information without interrupting their game or having to switch back-and-forth between browser tabs. I am expecting that I would need to do a lot of the work on the Flash side myself, as far as formatting, for example, but I would like to feel comfortable in querying the wiki's database to get info directly. I guess this means that I need a wiki that is structured relatively "flat" or intuitively so that I can do things like:
Run a MySQL query that returns a list of all the articles (their titles and IDs) in the wiki
For each article ID in the wiki, return the associated content
This may mean that I have to limit the kinds of formatting I put into the wiki -- things like tables would probably be omitted since they would be very difficult, if not impossible, for me to do on the Flash side. And that is fine!
Basically I am just looking for suggestions for wiki software that is pretty easy to use, but mostly is technically simple enough on the back-end that interfacing with it directly via MySQL is not difficult. When interfacing with the database directly, I only need to READ data. Any time the wiki would be edited or added to would be done via the wiki's actual front-end application.
Thanks for any suggestions!
MediaWiki is the best-known and best-supported MySQL-based Wiki, used for plenty of complex game documentation projects like MinecraftWiki. The database is not all that simple, but it's well documented and basic read operations aren't too hard. For example, here's how to fetch the current content of the page "MyPage":
SELECT old_text FROM page,revision,text WHERE page.page_title="MyPage" AND
page.page_id=revision.rev_page AND revision.rev_text_id=text.old_id;
(And yes, old_text is the current content of the page. Don't ask me why!)
Your main problem will be figuring out how to parse MediaWiki markup, there are plenty of parsers for it but I'm not aware of anything that would work in Flash.
I'm a relative newbie to web development. I know my HTML and CSS, and am getting involved with Ruby on Rails for some other projects, which has been daunting but very rewarding.
Basically I'm wondering if there's a language/backbone/program/solution to eliminate the copypasta trivialities of HTML, with some caveats. Currently my website is hosted on a school server and unfortunately can't use Rails. Being a newbie I also don't really know what other technologies are available to me (or even what those technologies might be). I'm essentially looking for a way to auto-insert all of my header/sidebar/footer/menu information, and when those need to be updated, the rest of the pages get updated. Right now, I have a sidebar that is a tree of all of the pages on my website. When I add a page, not only do I need to update the sidebar, I have to update it for every page in my domain. This is really inefficient and I'm wondering if there is a better way.
I imagine this is a pretty widespread problem, but searching Google turns up too many irrelevant links (design template websites, tutorials, etc.). I'd appreciate any help.
Oh, and I've heard of HAML as a way to render HTML; how would it be used in this situation?
Server Side Includes.
Old as time. Supported in most hosting situations. Often forgotten in favour of hugely overcomplicated templating systems. SSI still has a place.
You use a template language.
Most often this will be processed on the server, but there are offline solutions which you run though a utility to generate complete HTML documents for uploading.
I'm rather fond of Template-Toolkit which I usually use server side with Catalyst but it also very usable before you involve a web server using the ttree utility.
...........Wordpress?
I'd recommend Drupal. The tree structure of a menu is an inbuilt function and you basically can forget about it at all. And inserting whatever you want in specified areas (footer, header, whatever's defined in a template). It relies on PHP and MySQL - that stuff can be used on almost any server. And it has a moderate learning curve, so you should be able to start doing magic in little time.