Chapter 17. Adding Pages via CGI Script

This chapter finishes the example begun in Chapter 14, Chapter 15, and Chapter 16. In this chapter, we’ll see how a CGI frontend was used to simplify the process of adding new HTML pages to the Main School CyberFair site. Along the way, we’ll see some new tricks for making multistage CGI scripts, executing external commands from within a Perl script, and doing file locking.

Why Add Pages with a CGI Script?

Back at the beginning of Chapter 15 I talked about Jon Udell’s concept of a docbase, explaining that a docbase is a collection of documents that include some metainformation that a computer can understand. The HTML pages in the Main School CyberFair site are an example of a docbase, in that they contain important information in their META headers (and some other important information by virtue of where they are located in the site’s directory structure). As we saw in Chapter 15, that metainformation allows a Perl program to automatically construct links connecting the site’s pages to each other.

One of the drawbacks to this docbase approach is that it can be a challenge for fallible human beings to consistently adhere to the requirements it lays down for formatting new HTML pages correctly. Making that challenge even greater in this case was the fact that the people who were adding these pages were children under the age of 12, with most of them being relatively new to the task of creating HTML pages.

The solution was to use a CGI script ...

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