Carrelet

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This site gives a (fairly!) non-technical overview of Carrelet, the online website authoring solution from Cyberporte. You may also be interested in the following related sites:

• www.cyberporte.com/carrelethowto, which explains how to use Carrelet to create and maintain your website;
• www.cyberporte.com/carreletfaqs, which attempts to answer some of the more common questions concerning Carrelet;
• www.cyberporte.com/, the website of SARL Cyberporte.

This site has been built using Carrelet. For any constructive comments relating to this page, please email mark@cyberporte.com. Happy browsing!

What is it?

Carrelet is a system that enables you to build your website from our website. Once you have logged into our server, you can modify your site as often as you like, and the changes are 'published' at once on the Internet.

Carrelet is server-based, which means that any reasonably modern computer system with a web browser can be used to control your site. You can add a page from your place of work during your lunch break, modify it from a cybercafé on the way home and upload a photo from home.

Carrelet offers a range of page layouts, colour schemes and text sizes, as well as the possibility to add images to each page, so you can make your site your own.

Carrelet can add email forms and guestbooks with a few mouseclicks: you don't have to worry about scripts, forms or cookies!

In short, with Carrelet, you can have your website up and running in an hour, with no more technical expertise than you need to browse the Net.

Who might want to use it?

Carrelet is cheap, easy to use and easy to maintain. It could therefore be of particular interest to

• Individuals, associations and small businesses who want to create a website, but who do not want to worry about the complexities of authoring software, ftp, scripting...
• People on the move, who want to be able to update their website from wherever they are, such as businessmen, missionaries, back-packers...
• Schools, colleges and universities, who would like their students to create a website as part of a project, and who want to place the emphasis on content rather than technology.

What can it do?

The current version of Carrelet (v0.90) offers the following features:

• Up to 20 pages per site
• Logo on all pages (gif, jpeg or png format)
• Optional image on each page
• Site navigation menus generated automatically
• Choice of page layouts
• Choice of colour schemes
• Choice of text sizes
• All choices are retroactive (ie you can change the 'look' of the entire site with a few mouse clicks)
• Automatic email form
• Automatic guestbook
• Text entry as plain text, for really simple web page creation
• formatted text entry (allows bold and italic text of various Sizes, plus lists, tables and headings, using simple commands)
• html text entry, for total control over the appearance of your website
• 'convert to html' option, which means you can get the basic page layout straight using plain or formatted text, and then convert it to html in order to fine-tune the layout
• 'All Text' menu option, which presents all the textual content of your site on a single, simple page (ideal for printing)

Several major new features are planned for the next version.

Acknowledgements

The basic system has been designed, developed and documented by Mark Howe. Stephen Poulard designed some of the master pages and themes. Samuel Chaignepain advised on the themes. Amy Newnham tested the beta-test version, while Paul Hazelden debugged the documentation.

Carrelet is written in Perl, using the standard CGI module, and runs on an Apache server. The development version runs under Suse Linux, while the online version runs under Red Hat Linux.

Mark is particularly attached to the following books:

• Programming Perl, 2e, by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen and Randal L. Schwartz, O'Reilly 1996
• Perl Cookbook, by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington, O'Reilly 1998
• Mastering Regular Expressions, by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, O'Reilly 1997
• Learning Perl/Tk, by Nancy Walsh, O'Reilly 1999

Carrelet is a product of SARL Cyberporte. Copyright 2001, all rights reserved.

How to contact us

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