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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

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

11. 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

12. 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