Programs for Creating Static Webpages Only

[RikBrown]

I'm new here & using FMP 6.0 [MS-Windows]. I'm looking for a solution for publishing static webpages to a local server to be FTP-ed for remote servers.

We have over 500,000 webpages so the solution must be fast. We are currently using a perl program known as Hyperseek with mySQL. It has certain limitations that I hope FMP can solve (mainly, local input/editing & non-English characters).

Can anyone recommend 3rd party programs to assist in the creation of large amounts of static webpages, including full international language support? I am familiar with HTML coding (all of our webpages are currently created with a text editor).

Or, are there simple ways to accomplish massive amounts of static webpages within FMP? I have the book, FileMaker Pro 6 Bible, but it only has a few pages of information that doesn't seem enough to get me going with this project.

Any help pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.

Thanks. -- Rik

[Steve T.]

Hi, Rik!

Although I'm relatively new compared to some of our pro's, I don't think I've ever heard of FM being used in that way before, i.e. a static web page generator. The typical use of a web-published db is to avoid generating thousands of static web pages for ftp upload in which you create a template web page that is used to plug db info into and the HTML is generated on-the-fly.

If you use Custom Web Publishing, you must create the template pages yourself. If you use Instant Web Publishing, FM tries to simulate a layout and generates an HTML equivalent best guess. Neither of these produce files, though. I suppose you could save a generated web page as an HTML document from a web browser once it's created on-the-fly, but it seems like a lot of trouble with potential problems that would probably be better served (literal pun!) by a web-served database.

500,000 records is a lot, but I think others have published their db's with lots of records. Someone had asked the maximum number of records they could have and serve on the web... I don't remember the answers exactly, but they may have successfully served somewhere in your neighborhood. If not a single db, surely you could break it up into categorized sets or something if you had to.

I am not familiar with Hyperseek, but MySQL can handle a boat load of records and I'd be surprised if 500,000 was beyond its capability. You can use it to store and serve your information instead of (I'm guessing) storing your actual static html pages (very odd to me).

I use FM-Unlimited alone to web serve databases. Some folks use FM-U in conjunction with FM-Server. Some other folks use their standard/traditional web servers (such as Apache) and use PHP or middleware to draw data from the FM db's to then be served by Apache (or other web server). There are many other options, variations, and combinations, as well. Do you have a web host that does not offer web-db options and that's why you want to FTP upload everything?

--ST

[Garry Claridge]

You could use PHP to query the database and generate a web-page which is then stored as a text file. PHP can then use CURL to ftp the file to whereever you like. (You could even use Python to do all of this.)

Good Luck.

Garry

[RikBrown]

We use 500,000 static webpages to reduce server load since the pages do not change often (we update about every 3-6 months). The records are actually close to 4 million. We plan to double these figures soon so we are looking for something better than our current Hyperseek/mySQL combo.

Five years ago, we even used a 1980s DOS-based database named r:Base which actually worked quite well but had to be abandoned as it couldn't handle long filenames. I had hoped that FMP could do what that old program 1980 prograam could. We simply had the database output a "report" which was our HTML page. This was done with a bunch of script files.

Thanks for your help. Guess I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed.

Regards. -- Rik

[RikBrown]

I'll search for PHP solutions. I had hoped I wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel.

Thanks. -- Rik

[Garry Claridge]

FM can be setup with Scripts to generate html pages. You will have to build a template with Calc/Global fields.

You could also use XML/XSLT for this. Having thought about it a bit more this may be the better way to go.

You can use some other system scriting to FTP the pages.

All the best.

Garry