MOWYW(1) Manual Page

• mowyw

• mowyw --make --source-prefix sp --destination-prefix dp --menu-prefix mp --includes-prefix=ip --postifx=.html

mowyw is a text processor for building static websites. It supports includes, menus, external datasources (like XML files or databases) and syntax hilighting.

To use mowyw you need three directories called source, online and includes. source holds the source files that are to be interpreted by mowyw. When you run mowyw, it will walk (recursively) through the source dir, and for each file it either copies it verbatimely to online, or, if the file looks like HTML (ends on .html, .shtml, .htm etc.) it is processed by mowyw, and the output is written into the online dir.

In includes/ are include files (how surprising), header, footer, global include files, and optionally data source files.

You should always execute mowyw from the parent directory of these three directories.

The name of these three directories can be overridden with command line options.

• --make Only process files with a newer timestamp than the corresponding `online/' file.

• --postfix Append the given postfix to the filename of all included file names (and menu files). Defaults to the empty string.

• --includes-prefix Change the search path for include files. Defaults to `includes/'.

• --menu-prefix Change the search for menu files. Defaults to includes/menu-.

• --destination-prefix Change the path for the output files. Defaults to `online/'.

• --source-prefix Change the search path for source files. Defaults to `source/'. Must be a directory.

• --encoding Interpret all input files to have that encoding. Defaults to UTF-8. (Conjecture: should default to the current locale… what to do?).

mowyw processes files in several steps:

• The file mowyw.conf is read (if it exists)

• The source directory is traversed

• For all source file that is actually processed

  • the file includes/global is read, if it exists

  • the current file is read, all markup is processed

  • the file includes/header is processed and prepended to the current output file

  • the file includes/footer is processed and appended to the current output file

Normal text (including HTML markup) is copied verbatimely to the output file.

Special directives are delimited either with [% … %] (preferred) or with [[[ … ]]] (deprecated, but still supported for compatibility).

Many elements take options, which are usually whitespace delimited, for example [% include includefile.html %].

Inline elements consist only of one tag, while block elements run until the matching end tag.

The following inline elements are supported:

• include includes a file, and processes it. Example: [% include coypright.html %].

• menu refers to a menu. See section MENUES below.

• item defines a menu item. See section MENUES below.

• option sets an option, for example [% option no-header %]. See section OPTIONS below.

• comment ignores everything up to the tag end. Example: [% comment this comments appears nowhere in the output %].

• setvar sets a variable. Example: [% setvar title Title of this page%].

• readvar reads and outputs a variable. You can optionally specify an escape mechanism. Example: <h1>[% readvar title %]</h1> or [% readvar db.column escape:html %].

• bind binds a variable to a datasource. See section DATA SOURCES below.

The following block elements are supported:

• verbatim reads the file until it finds an endverbatim tag. It expects a marker, which must be present at the end tag as well. Everything inbetween is taken verbatimly, i.e. it is not processed at all. Keywords are not allowed as markers. Example: [% verbatim foo %] Some [% non-processed %] markup [% endverbatim foo %]

• syntax uses vim(1) to do syntax hilighting. Expects the name of the language or configuration as its only argument. Example: <pre>[%syntax perl%]print "Hello, world\n";[%endsyntax%]</pre>.

• for iterates of a datasource. See section DATA SOURCES below.

• ifvar executes the block only if the variable is defined. Example: [% ifvar title %]<h1>[%readvar title%]</h1>[% endifvar %].

mowyw has special menu support. To define a menu named foo, create a file source/menu-foo with the following contents:

<h2>Your menu title</h2>
<ul>
    [% item home  <li><a {{class="active"}}
        href="/">Home</a></li> %]
    [% item first <li><a {{class="active"}}
        href="/first">First</a></li> %]
    [% item sec <li><a {{class="active"}}
        href="/sec/">First</a>
        {{
             [% comment this is a sub menu that will only be visible
                 inside the `sec' menu %]
             [% item subitem1 <p>More menu markup</p> %]
             [% item subitem2 <p>Even more menu markup</p> %]
        }}
    </li>
    %]
 </ul>

Now in your index page you can include that menu with the directive [% menu home %]. This will produce the menu contents with the markup stripped, and insde the home all of the contents will appear, the other menu items only contribute the parts that are not enclosed in double curly braces.

Menus can ben nested, a nested menu entry can be accessed for example with [% menu sec subitem1 %].

It's best to take a look at the examples in the distribution, which should nicely illustrate the menu mechanism.

Currently only two options are supported, no-header and no-footer. If they are set in a file via [% option no-header %], the inclusion of header or footer files will be omitted.

You can access external data sources by first bind'ing a variable to a data source, and then iterating with a for loop over that source.

This is best illustrated with a short example.

File includes/news.xml:

<rootTag>
    <item>
        <headline>China buys Google</headline>
        <status>April's fool joke</stoke>
        <date>2007</date>
    </item>
    <item>
        <headline>Perl and Python join forces: Larry Wall and Guido von
        Rossum announce 'parrot'</headline>
        <status>April's fool joke</stoke>
        <date>Very old</date>
    </item>
</rootTag>

Now you can access the contents of this XML file in your source files:

[% bind news_variable type:xml file:news.xml root:item %]
[% comment and iterate over news_variable %]
[% for i in news_variable %]
    <h2>Breaking news: [% readvar i.headline %]</h2>
    <p>Status: [% readvar i.status %]</p>
[% endfor %]

Data sources are handled via plugins. Currently XML and DBI are supported.

The XML source is explained by the example above (it doesn't have any more options). It is quite limited in that the file structure always has be the same: one root tag that contains a list of secondary tags, each of which many only contain distinct tags. Nested tags might work, but aren't officially supported.

DBI is perls generic database interface. You can use it to access a database. This has some limitations, for example you can't reuse database connections, so every bind statement actually opens a database connection on its own.

For the brave, here is an example of how to use it:

[% bind my_db type:dbi dsn:DBI:mysql:database=yourdatabse;host=dbhost
   username:your_db_user password:you_db_password encoding:latin1
   sql:'SELECT headline, status FROM news LIMIT 10'
%]
[% for i in my_db %]
    <h2>Breaking news: [% readvar i.headline escape:html %]</h2>
    <p>Status: [% readvar i.status escape:html %]</p>
[% endfor %]

The options are as follows:

• The dsn option is the "data source name" that DBI's connect method accepts. It always starts with DBI:, then followed by the driver name like mysql or Pg (for Postgres) and the driver options.

• The encoding option is optional and defaults to utf-8. You can use any character encoding here that Perl's cool Encode module supports, which is quite a many.

• the password and username options can be omitted if your database doesn't ask for them

This plugin may seem weird if you don't know Perl and its database module. If that's the case, consider toying around with Perl and DBI first (it's really worth a try).

Mowyw tries to read a file called mowyw.conf. Within that file you can configure pathes and file names on a per-file base.

An example config file might look like this:

MATCH[german]    = \.de
POSTFIX[german]  = .de
MATCH[english]   = \.en
POSTFIX[english] = .en

This defines two sections called "german" and "english". If a file matches the regular expression \.de, it is treated as being in section "german". All include files will have the postfix .de, which means that if a file is called source/index.html.de, the header file will be includes/header.de, a menu foo will be searched for in file includes/menu-foo.de etc.

This configuration mechanism is primarily intented for creating mutilingual sites, but might be useful for other things as well.

If something isn't clear to you, please take a look into the README file and the examples in the source tarball. If that doesn't answer your questions, don't hesitate to contact the author.

The official website can be found here: Mowyw homepage.

mowyw was written to get its author's job done, and it does that well. While it was written with generality in mind, there are still some restrictions that were accepted as a tradeoff for simplicity.

• Error messages aren't very useful for the uninitiated, and aren't annotated with line numbers. The latter will hopefully be fixed (which should make the former less intrusive).

• Disk space: mowyw keeps two complete copies of a project on disk, the source files and the resulting online files. This might not be optimal, and consumes unnecessary space for files that are not processed anyway.

• Memory: mowyw is written in Perl, which is not know to be terribly memory efficient. Additionally it slurps the files into memory before parsing, which isn't terribly efficient either. But it's simple, and if it's not enough for you, go get a bigger machine.

• All input files are assumed to be encoded in UTF-8. This might become configurable one day.

• There are some limitations due to multi-pass parsing. For example you can't include the string %] in SQL statements, because it is considered to be a tag closer by the lexer. A future rewrite might change that.

• Mowyw isn't very well tested, because in its current structure it's not very easy to test. This has to be changed, and it will.

Written by Moritz Lenz moritz@faui2k3.org.

Copyright 2006 - 2008 by Moritz Lenz.

This is free software. You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2.1 or 3 (choose the one you prefer).

There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.