Conceptually, this isn't that difficult: a basic system would involve CGIs that accept the user input (presumably after validation) and write that information out to static HTML files. The biggest worry will be security; if you don't do a good job validating users and protecting your files, you run the risk of having your pages defaced or worse. A major problem is that this method requires that the user the webserver runs as has permission to modify files in the web tree, so you'll need to be *very* careful setting things up, permissions-wise.

If there are going to be a number of different pages of the same form that are user-updatable, you're definitely going to want a to use a templating system, such as HTML::Template (basic but effective) or Template Toolkit (more powerful, more difficult to learn -- but worth it). Then you can take the user input, plug in into the template, and voilà!

You might look into the "wiki" concept, depending on your needs.

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

In reply to Re: User-updatable web sites by arturo
in thread User-updatable web sites by Stamp_Guy

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