Manila Sameer Totey CSCI 7818 – Web Technologies. 11/13/2018

Introduction Manila is an Internet server application that allows groups of writers, designers and graphics people to manage full-featured, high performance Web sites through an easy-to-use browser interface. Manila is included as part of the UserLand Frontier content management system, an $899 commercial product for Windows and Macintosh. Student version costs $299 Version 5.01 of Frontier is still available free, however it does not contain Manila 11/13/2018 Sameer Totey

Manila featuers Manila turns the Web into an easy and powerful multi-user writing environment that's accessible to anyone who knows how to use a browser It is a substitute for HTML editors, word processors, FTP clients and collaboration groupware like Lotus Notes. It allows browser based editing of web sites Edit this page buttons are present everywhere. This simulates web that is write-read instead of read-only. 11/13/2018 Sameer Totey

Manila demo Creating a website using Manila is very easy - Cookies and caching. Anyone who can use a web browser can become a web editor ! Unlike other tools that allow users to create web sites easily Manila is flexible and scalable. - It has scriptable power Manila provides advanced features that are optional. 11/13/2018 Sameer Totey

Manila Basics Membership and roles Types of Manila Sites - Managing Editor, Contributing Editor, Member, Visitor Types of Manila Sites - Brochure sites, Essay sites, Community sites, Newsroom sites Everything is stored as a message in the Manila Database, manila.root which is part of Frontier database frontier.root - Some Messages are stories, some are pictures, others are plain discussion group messages. Frontier's object database is organized much like your computer's desktop, but instead of folders or directories Frontier has tables 11/13/2018 Sameer Totey

How Manila works Manila is a serving process. All contents are stored as messages When a user access a web page the Manila serving process renders the page on the users browser. 11/13/2018 Sameer Totey

Check visitor membership Message #1234 Text…picture…shortcut...text Check visitor membership Wrap template around the message Run macros (title etc.) Convert Shortcut into link Insert picture Server finished page 11/13/2018 Sameer Totey

Performance Easy to create and change, what about performance Static Rendering - Static rendering means creating .html files from your Manila website and saving them to disk. This creates a traditional website, the kind that can be served by non-Manila servers such as Apache, WebSTAR, and IIS, servers that are optimized for serving static files from disk. Your static server doesn't know about Manila -- it doesn't need to. - Static rendering options are part of Frontier. 11/13/2018 Sameer Totey

Flexible You can control many aspects of website appearance and functions through preferences. Syndication preference Searching preference Advanced preferences - Navigation, templates, site structure, javascripts etc. 11/13/2018 Sameer Totey

UserLand All UserLand products and services complement each other and tied together in that sense. 11/13/2018 Sameer Totey

Issues No Enterprise database support. No Spell checker ! Security not clear May not be ideal for Enterprise solution but serves almost all other needs 11/13/2018 Sameer Totey

Future Web becoming synonymous with Internet because applications of all other Internet protocol are being usurped by the “web” Products like Manila help create superior newsgroups on the web, will make usenet and NNTP eventually obsolete Helping evolve WWW to become write-read in a limited sense 11/13/2018 Sameer Totey