This site contains the latest user documentation for Carrelet, the online website authoring solution from Cyberporte. You may also be interested in the following related sites:
If you prefer to print this documentation to read offline, click on the all Text menu option.
This site has been built using Carrelet. For any constructive comments relating to this page, please email mark@cyberporte.com. Happy browsing!
Apart from that, most things should be fairly obvious, and, in any case, you can always change any mistakes. Or, in extremis, you could always look at the rest of the documentation...
As a user of Carrelet, your browser serves two quite different purposes:
Carrelet uses a subset of HTML 4, which is one of the most widely-used standards for web page design. It should therefore work on almost any reasonably recent browser. On the other hand, the same page can look quite different, depending on the browser.
Bear in mind that most Internet users will see your site using Microsoft Internet Explorer (for Linux users, Opera appears to render pages in a similar way to IE, see www.opera.com).
You really need to be able to see your site at the same time as Carrelet. Most browsers allow you to open a second window.
If you can disable the page cache, do. In any case, you will need to click on reload page in order to see changes to your site. Do not use the previous page button on your browser when there is a continue button on the page: this is because Carrelet generates forms dynamically, taking into account the changes you make to the page.
This is where you make choices affecting every page of your site. You can change the settings at any time. The options are as follows:
Click modify and then continue to return to the main menu.
The master pages vary mainly in the way they present navigation menus.
All these menus are also available with a pop-up menu at the bottom of the page. This is useful for sites with long pages, as the user can change pages without scrolling back to the top.
This is where you set up one particular page. The options are as follows:
Click modify and then continue to return to the main menu.
(Hint: once you have changed the page titles and menu entries, it may not be immediately obvious what page number you want to edit. The easiest way to find out is to click on the page you want on the site itself and see what number appears in the browser url window. For example, page 5 will be called something/index5.html.)
The plain text option allows paragraphs of text to be entered with a minimum of formatting. Characters that have a special meaning in html (eg <,>,&...) and top-bit characters (eg éçù) are converted. Multiple spaces and single carriage returns are converted to single spaces, while two or more carriage returns are converted to paragraph breaks. Email addresses are made clickable, as are web site addresses beginning with http:// or http://.
There is a special format for links within a Carrelet-generated site:
http:p9
produces a relative link to page 9 of the site, and inserts 'page 9' into the text. Note that relative links are currently not checked to see if there is really a page 9, and are not recalculated if pages are added or deleted.
It probably makes sense to start creating your pages using this mode, and to change to formatted text as and when you need greater control over the layout.
The formatted text option allows for basic formatting of text, without resorting to html. Paragraphs, email addresses and web site addresses function as for plain text. In addition, the following functions are available:
The \ character can be used to display characters that would otherwise have a special meaning in formatted text mode. So, for example, you can start a paragraph with a dash by typing
\-Here is a paragraph of text
to produce
-Here is a paragraph of text
instead of
Here is a paragraph of text
(As you might imagine, there are a lot of backslashes in the source code of this page!)
These are produced by putting a line containing a single dot between two paragraphs, eg
Now is the
.
time for
.
all
.
good
.
men to come to the aid of their
.
party
produces
Now is the
time for
all
good
men to come to the aid of their
party
These are produced by enclosing the text in square and curly braces respectively,eg
This is {another} [fine] [{mess}] you got me into Stanley!
produces
This is another fine mess you got me into Stanley!
This is achieved by 'bracketing' the text with a two-character sequence. The ^ symbol is used to increase the size of text, while the _ character is used to decrease it. So, for example,
Alice drunk the magic potion and got 1^bigger^1 and 2^bigger^2 and 3^bigger^3, and the world seemed 1_smaller_1 and 2_smaller_2 and 3_smaller_3.
produces
Alice drunk the magic potion and got bigger and bigger and bigger, and the world seemed smaller and smaller and smaller.
Six levels of heading can be specified by beginning the paragraph with the number followed by the + sign, eg
2+Headings
produces the heading above.
Each paragraph begins with a # character, eg
#first item
#second item
#etc
produces
Note the blank line between each paragraph.
Each paragraph begins with a * character, eg
*first item
*second item
*etc
produces
These are produced by beginning the paragraph with a - sign, eg
-Perl is a language for getting yor job done.
-Of course, if your job is programming, you can get your job done with any "complete" computer language, theoretically speaking. But we all know that computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy. At one extreme, the so-called "fourth-generation languages" make it easy to do some things, but nearly impossible to do other things. At the other extreme, certain well-known "industrial-strength" languages make it equally difficult to do almost everything.
-Perl is different. In a nutshell, Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible.
-[Larry Wall, {Programming Perl, 2e}, O'Reilly 1996]
produces
Perl is a language for getting yor job done.
Of course, if your job is programming, you can get your job done with any "complete" computer language, theoretically speaking. But we all know that computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy. At one extreme, the so-called "fourth-generation languages" make it easy to do some things, but nearly impossible to do other things. At the other extreme, certain well-known "industrial-strength" languages make it equally difficult to do almost everything.
Perl is different. In a nutshell, Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy, without making the hard jobs impossible.
Larry Wall, Programming Perl, 2e, O'Reilly 1996
These are produced by starting each paragraph of the table with a |. The | character is also used to separate rows. Note that leading and trailing whitespace is stripped from cells, so you can add extra spaces to get the columns to line up, without affecting the final output, eg
|Name|Favourite food|Favourite book
|Gus|Bananas|Planet of the Apes
|Bugs|Carrots|A brief history of tunnel construction techniques
|Brian|Lettuce leaves|More haste less speed: a parable of modern life
produces
| Name | Favourite food | Favourite book |
| Gus | Bananas | Planet of the Apes |
| Bugs | Carrots | A brief history of tunnel construction techniques |
| Brian | Lettuce leaves | More haste less speed: a parable of modern life |
Note that paragraph styles cannot currently be nested, eg it is not possible to produce multi-level lists or tables. If you need more control over the layout of text, the best solution is html. You can convert formatted text into html automatically: see page 9.
This mode allows html to be entered directly. The formatting options are thus far more flexible, but at the price of considerably greater complexity.
If you just need to a few changes to the format of the page, the easiest way to proceed is to create the page using formatted text, convert it to html, and then modify the html as necessary.
In this mode, the html should consist of one or more paragraphs, delimited by <p>...</p> tags. Note that it is quite possible to render your page unreadable if you use html incorrectly. There are many excellent html tutorials available: www.w3c.org is one place to start.
As mentioned on previous pages, it is possible to convert plain or formatted text into html. Carrelet proceeds as if it was going to write to the website, but instead replaces the plain or formatted text with the html.
Note that there is no way within Carrelet to perform the converse operation, ie convert html into plain or formatted text, so think twice before clicking once!
It is possible to add a logo that will appear on each page, and also to add an image to the top of each page 'body'. The files can be in gif, jpeg or png format, and should be less than 70k in size.
To select a file to upload to the site, click on the browse button on the add image part of the main menu. You should then be able to move around your hard disc until you find the file. Please make sure that the pathname showing after selecting a file is really a file (ie it ends in .gif, .jpg, .jpeg or .png) rather than a directory.
You can then select the page to which the image is to be added, and click on Go!.
Deleting images is achieved using the delete image form. Note that the logo displayed on all pages can be overwritten but not deleted.
As mentioned before, some browsers, notably Netscape, do not reload images, even if the page is reloaded. If you change an image, and the web site does not appear to change, try quitting and reloading your browser.
To add a guestbook to a page, tick the guestbook option on the edit page page.
If you untick this box, the guestbook will be preserved, ie if you later tick the box the guestbook will reappear with the previous entries intact. This may be useful if you want to take the guestbook offline for a while.
If you delete the guestbook, all the entries will be lost, and the guestbook option will be unticked. You can delete a guestbook whether or not it is visible.
The merge guestbook option converts the guestbook entries into editable text in formatted text format. This can be useful if, for example, you have used a guestbook for a discussion and want to summarise what was said.
Please use this page for any comments that you think would be useful for the developers or users of Carrelet. (Note that you will not see your contribution to the page unless you click on 'reload page' in your browser after submitting the contribution.)