Hi, Stian!
Am Donnerstag, den 15.04.2010, 14:41 +0200 schrieb Stian Rødven Eide:
Is there a good document that explains how we get started with using the generator,
No. The generator was originally intended and created to be used for FSFE's web pages on www.fsfe.org and nothing else. The idea that it could be used for other web pages came up only very recently. Hugo (IIRC) is working on transferring it to documentfreedom.org as we speak, and both your and Hugos experiences will be valuable input for further development of the generator.
However, you are lucky: the original author of the generator is Jonas Öberg, to whom you probably have very good contact ;-)
In any case: our plan should be to bring the generator to a state where it's usable in the "general case", not to create different forks of the script for different purposes.
Please note that the main features of the script are: * Translation management * Generation of HTML pages from various independent XML sources (e.g. generation of a single news page where each news entry is in its own XML file) * Passing of the pages through a global XSLT script which add menu, header, footer etc.
Depending on what you need, the build script might actually be overkill. If you don't need translations and there's no dynamic overview pages, you can achieve the same with a trivial 10 line Makefile.
and how we can extend it with database functionality (such as the petition)?
The generator actually does not much more than to create HTML files by sticking together fragments from different sources. If you want database functionality, you have to program the CGI yourself. If you want highly dynamic web pages, the generator isn't the right tool.
Thanks, Reinhard