Generating a 100% static site with IWP

[WilliamCB]

Filemaker's currently pushing itself as an alternative to Excel, which is exactly how we use it, for crunching lots of data. Now we want to display tables of data on the web.

The Instant Web Publishing does what we need. But we're expecting a lot more traffic than the 100 simultaneous connections the server allows. So we're looking at generating an entirely static website from the Filemaker database. That is, once the website is generated, it consists only of html files and the Filemaker database is not needed at all to serve the pages. (And yes, that means there is zero interactivity).

Has anybody tried doing this with IWP or another Filemaker-to-web option (PHP site assistant etc)? I'm imagining we could use a spider to crawl the IWP website and store all the html pages, then we'd do a clever search and replace across all the files (and filenames) to create a coherent set of links between the pages.

Why not just export HTML tables? Because the Filemaker solution we have already has all the navigation and organisation that we need, and we intend to go on developing it and don't want to split our development.

[Søren Dyhr]

Wrong tool utilization, IWP is for dynamic files, but I would suggest you read this:

http://www.efuse.com/Build/database_publishing_basics.html

--sd

[WilliamCB]

Yes, IWP is the wrong tool for the job. But it's where we happen to be starting from. I've read the article and I think what you're suggesting is that we should use NetObjects Fusion to generate the static pages. Is that right? Looking at the NetObjects website, if the product still offers this kind of feature, then it has buried it under marketing-speak.

And from that point of view then, WebMerge would be an alternative (see http://www.fourthworld.com/products/webmerge/download.html), right?

[Søren Dyhr]

It could probably ...although the included filemaker file is a .fm3 - Is the required export as .mer still possible option, but the export is purely flatfile publishing ... as far as I can understand from the included examples, and the price tag is not too worrying...

If you're thrifty could you probably obtain something via an exploit a Googlemail account and then send filemakers "send as PDF" which instantly convert the issued pdf to HTML, but it really depends on the published functionality, should the user be able to single out data in special views and make sorting via buttons above columns.

--sd

Edited November 1, 2008 by Guest