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Ucampas reference manual

Ucampas reference manual

Ucampas (University of Cambridge web page augmentation system) is a page-formatting tool to convert simple HTML files into web pages that follow one of several provided house-style templates. It is used to maintain the Computer Laboratory main web site and can equally be used to format research-group pages, personal web pages, and websites of other organizations.

Features

  • Ucampas can auto-generate navigation links (side bar, bread crumbs, site map, etc.)
  • Ucampas scans a directory tree of HTML and uconfig.txt configuration files to determine the structure of the navigation tree
  • The resulting navigation tree closely follows the directory-tree structure by default, but overrides are possible
  • Entries in the uconfig.txt files determine the relative position of subnodes
  • Formatting parameters set in uconfig.txt files are inherited across entire subtrees
  • Ucampas output files use relative links were possible, for URL mobility and to support non-HTTP previewing
  • Ucampas detects certain HTML syntax errors (but is not a full HTML/SGML validator)
  • Ucampas converts HTML into XHTML
  • Input and output files are UTF-8 encoded
  • Output files are compacted; redundant whitespace or comments are removed
  • Ucampas can autogenerate content tables (like the one above)

Prerequisites

Ucampas should run on any Linux/Unix/macOS system with Perl 5.16.0 or newer. (The possibility of a Windows port is still under consideration, but don't hold your breath.)

Ucampas expects that its input files are encoded in UTF-8. Therefore, it is a good idea to use a UTF-8 locale when editing them (e.g., LANG=en_GB.UTF-8), which is anyway the default now on modern Linux. Without a UTF-8 locale, non-ASCII input characters such as “£” may cause an error and will not show up correctly on the web page.

Ucampas HTML input files should be syntactically correct. Make sure you regularly use some HTML syntax validation tool on them, such as HTML Validator.

Installation

In the Computer Laboratory, the latest ucampas release is already installed. Just put /anfs/www/tools/ into your $PATH. (Alternatively, add symbolic links to the /anfs/www/tools/ucampas* files to a directory that is already listed in your PATH.)

You can also download and install ucampas onto your own computer:

  • As a tarball: ucampas.tar.gz
  • Directly from the git repository:
    git clone https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/git/ucampas ucampas
    git clone https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/git/perl-PlexTree ucampas/perl-PlexTree
    

Check the included README.txt file for further instructions.

Getting started

Ucampas reads a simple, undecorated file named something-b.html and generates from that a file named something.html. The former (*-b.html) file is intended for human editing, the latter will be served to the web browser.

The input file should be a regular HTML 4 or XHTML 1 file, such as

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title>Document title</title>
<h1>Main heading</h1>
<p>Some text ...
<h2>A section heading</h2>

Save this example file as test-b.html. Then type into the shell the command line

ucampas test

If you have not yet adjusted your PATH, type

/anfs/www/tools/bin/ucampas test

The input file test-b.html is now processed by the HTML parser of ucampas, converted into a tree data structure, and transformed to match the house style. Finally, the transformed document tree is written out in XHTML 1 format as the file test.html, which can then be viewed with a web browser.

You can specify several files on the same ucampas command line, which will be processed faster than if you call ucampas several times, once for each file. Option -r recursively processes an entire branch of your navigation tree.

HTML extensions

Ucampas offers some pre-processing functions for its HTML input text that can help to make life easier.

Special <div> elements

The following <div> elements, all belonging to a special ucampas-... class, will automatically be filled or replaced by ucampas if found in the input file:

<div class="ucampas-toc"></div>
Fill with a table of contents. The entries of the table of content are exactly the <h1>, <h2>, ..., <h6> elements that have an id attribute value set, which will be the name of the corresponding anchor. Some house-styles may define different layout variants for the table of contents, such as <div class="ucampas-toc right"></div> to make it float on the right-hand side.
<div class="ucampas-tabs"></div>
Fill with a tabbed representation of the navigation tree. The generated HTML content is a sequence of <ul> elements, one for each row of tabs, containing one <li> for each tab. (The CSS stylesheet used will have to make provisions to display these nicely as tabs.)

You can use several uconfig.txt parameters (see below) to control, which part of the navigation tree is to be inserted as tabs: tabstop, tabtop, tabtopinclude work just like navstop, navtop, navtopinclude, but affect the tabs inserted here, rather than the standard (e.g., left-hand) navigation tree.

<div class="ucampas-include-text">'filename.txt'</div>
Include the content of a plaintext file.
<div class="ucampas-include-html">'filename.html'</div>
Include the body content of an HTML file. Any <div class="ucampas-..."> elements in the included documents will also be processed, therefore such HTML inclusions can be nested recursively. Relative URLs from the included document are adjusted.

[Lots more exist, but still have to be documented, generating RSS feeds, navigation lists, file lists, sitemaps, etc.]

In addition, there is

<meta name="ucampas-config" content="key=value, ...">
The content attribute string will be interpreted as additional configuration parameters, using the same syntax used in uconfig.txt files.

Verbatim text with CDATA sections

The characters < and & are part of the HTML syntax. If they appear in plaintext to be included into a HTML document, they need to be replaced with &lt; and &amp;, respectively. This can be a nuisance if your web page contains source code or similar material rich in these characters. Ucampas offers a convenient alternative solution: it implements XML’s CDATA section. In any part of a HTML input file enclosed by <![CDATA[ and ]]>, the characters < and & will lose their special meaning. Ucampas will then convert them for you into &lt; or &amp; in the output file, and will also remove the <![CDATA[ and ]]> delimiters, which (although part of XHTML) are not understood by most other HTML parsers. CDATA sections cannot include the string ]]> and cannot be nested.

Examples:

<pre><![CDATA[
if (a < b) c &= 1;
]]></pre>
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
if (a < b) c &= 1;
//]]>
</script>

Configuration files (uconfig.txt)

The behaviour of ucampas can be influenced by parameter settings made in a configuration file uconfig.txt located in the same directory as the input and output HTML files.

Ucampas not only looks for a uconfig.txt file in that directory, but also in its parent directory. If such a file is found there, ucampas continues further up the directory tree for as long as it encounters an uninterrupted sequence of uconfig.txt files. The highest directory found this way becomes the root directory of the navigation tree. For the Computer Laboratory main web site, this root directory is at /anfs/www/html.

Tip: While searching for its root directory, ucampas will follow the “..” link in each directory to find the next higher parent directory, unless there exists a single-line file (or symbolic link) “..u” containing a directory path that should be treated as the parent node instead. This feature is useful if a subtree of a web site is located (via a symlink) elsewhere. For example, if a research group has its web site at /auto/groups/comparch/www and has at the standard place /anfs/www/html/research/comparch just a symlink to the former, then creating a corresponding reverse link with “echo /anfs/www/html/research >/usr/groups/comparch/www/..u” will still help ucampas to still find its root, even when processing files outside the main directory tree. (Making “..u” a symlink is no longer recommended: symlinks can cause problems for Windows or SMB users and they may unintentionally expose file space if web servers follow them.)

Tip: After having read a uconfig.txt file, ucampas will also try to read uconfig2.txt from the same directory, and append any settings found in there to the configuration. This can be particularly useful for testing, to avoid having to modify a version controlled uconfig.txt file when some configuration parameters need to be overridden in a personal working directory (e.g., url or file_access).

The site root directory usually contains a uconfig.txt file that sets parameters that are valid for much of the site, e.g. the name of the department, the name and details of the page style to be used, or the contact details of the page maintainer:

organization="Computer Laboratory",
webmaster=(email="[Javascript required]"),
style=ucam2008,
breadcrumbs=1,
people, research, seminars, techreports, privacy.html

Library directory: Ucampas will also look for a uconfig.txt file in its library directory. This is the directory where the ucampas executable was installed, but with any trailing “/bin” replaced with “/share/ucampas”. The uconfig.txt file there can be used for installation-wide default settings, which will be loaded before the root uconfig.txt file, and can therefore be overridden by the latter. You should only put parameters there, no subnodes.

In addition to parameter assignments, the uconfig.txt file also contains the list of file or directory names that form the subnodes of the current directory in the navigation structure. Because Unix directories are just sets of files, without any explicit relative order, and because it may not be desirable to have all files and subdirectories in a directory to automatically become visible subnodes of a web page, it is necessary to list them explicitly in the uconfig.txt file. Simply add these files separated by commas after the parameter assignments. (Ucampas will distinguish between parameter assignments and file names in this comma-separated list by looking for an “=” sign.)

Syntax

The uconfig.txt files contain two types of entries: a set of key/value pair elements and a list of elements. Key/value pairs are separated by an equal sign (=), whereas list elements have no equal sign:

key1=value1, key2=value2, key3=value3, element1, element2, element3, element4

Both key/value pairs and list elements are separated by commas and optional white space (space, linefeed, etc.). A final comma will be ignored. Each key, value, or list element is a string of characters. As long as the string starts with a letter and contains only characters a-zA-Z0-9.:_- then no quotation marks are necessary, otherwise a string must be enclosed with '...' or "...".

In addition to a string, each key, value, or list element can also be augmented recursively with its own set of key/value pairs and list elements. These are appended to the string and enclosed in (...), as in:

key1=value1(key2=value2, element1), key3(element2)=value3, element3(element4)

The relative order in which entries appear in a uconfig.txt file matters only for list elements, but not for key/value pairs. Missing strings are distinguished from empty strings, that is key= and key="" do not mean the same thing. The syntax also distinguishes a special “meta string” that is preceded by an asterisk (e.g., *link or *"link").

Subnodes

The list elements (outside parenthesis) in a uconfig.txt file are the names of files or subdirectories that contain subpages of the current page. The current page is here the index.html file in the same subdirectory as the uconfig.txt file. In the above example, there are five subnodes, namely the four directories (people/, research/, seminars/, techreports/) and one file (privacy.html). Where a filename is given, it is always the file served to the web browser, not any *-b.html source file.

Once ucampas has found the uconfig.txt file of the root directory of the navigation tree, it recurses into any subdirectories listed there, in order to parse and store the entire tree of uconfig.txt files that are reachable through directories listed in the respective parent uconfig.txt.

Note: When processing a node, ucampas will display the pathname of that node relative to the root directory of the navigation tree. If that node is not reachable through any sequence of subnodes listed in uconfig.txt files, then the displayed path will show any missing entry as “[...]”. If this shows up, it means that the processed node cannot be reached by a “ucampas -r” run from the root and will not be reachable through the navigation tree. Such a node is a child whose parent does not know about its existence.

Subnodes can also be specified collectively using Unix-shell regular expressions using the *glob construct. Its first argument is a filename pattern that will be expanded just like in a Unix shell. For example, a list element *glob("*-b.html") expands into any existing *-b.html file in the directory that has not yet been otherwise listed. The first slash and anything beyond in any matched pathname will be discarded, which can be used to select directories by their content. For example, *glob("d*/index-b.html") will add to the list of subnodes all existing directories that start with the letter "d" and that contain an index-b.html file. Also, any parameters listed in a *glob element will be copied into each generated subnode, which can be used, for example, as in *glob("file[0-9]-b.html", invisible=1). To reverse the sorting order of subnodes added by *glob, use *globr instead.

Parameters

The key/value pairs in a uconfig.txt file are parameter settings that can be used to affect the formatting of the generated web pages or other aspects of ucampas behaviour. Some of the parameter values are just simple strings, others have a more complex structure and contain further key-value pairs and/or list elements.

A key/value pair (outside parenthesis) in a uconfig.txt file directly affects the formatting of the index.html file in this directory. However, most parameters are inherited, that is they also affect the processing of sub pages. Therefore, a key/value pair in a uconfig.txt will also affect other files and subdirectories in the same location, unless overridden further down. Parameters can also be specified in a uconfig.txt file for individual subnodes, by appending them in parenthesis to the listed subnode name, as in

techreports(webmaster=(email="[Javascript required]")),
privacy.html(navbar=0, breakcrumbs=0), policy.pdf(navtitle="Web policy")

There are two ways to modify the automatic inheritance of parameter settings to subnodes:

noninherit=(key=value, ...)
The provided parameter settings will affect only the current node, not any subnodes.
onlyinherit=(key=value, ...)
The provided parameter settings will affect only subnodes of the current node, not the current node itself.

The following parameters are inherited (unless otherwise specified) and are supported independent of the selected style:

add_head=html | (html, ...)
This parameter can be used to add additional HTML elements to the <head> of the output file. Example:
add_head = ( *meta(charset=utf8),
             *link(href="style/blue.css", rel="stylesheet", type="text/css") ),
change_check=boolean
If set to 1, ucampas will compare whether an output file that is about to be written differs from an already existing file that it would overwrite. If the content of both is found to be exactly equal, ucampas will not overwrite the file and will note instead "(no change)" on the console. This option can be of use to minimize the number of files that have to be reprocessed by a backup system after a large run of “ucampas -r”. If set to “t”, ucampas will in addition update the timestamp of the existing file (like the Unix tool “touch”).
discard_style=boolean
If set to 1, discard <style> elements from the <head> of the HTML input file. Try this if your input file was generated by an application that adds a style sheet of its own that breaks that added by ucampas.
display=string
Specifies the shell command line that option -d invokes in order to display (in a web browser) the web page that has just been processed. Ucampas will perform the following substitutions in this string:
%%
%
%a
absolute path of the output HTML file
%c
path of the output HTML file, as specified on the command line
%u
URL of the output HTML file, as specified by the url parameter.

Example: display='firefox "%u"'

file_access=boolean
If set to 1, ucampas will try to make sure that URLs in the output file also work well when browsed directly via the file:// protocol, as opposed to a HTTP/HTTPS server. The line “file_access=1,” is typically added to a uconfig2.txt file in a local preview working copy of a web site. This parameter should be left unset when formatting pages visible to the public. Option -i activates the same mechanism. This option triggers two changes:
  • Ucampas adds the suffix “index.html” to any relative URL in the output file that points to a directory. To do so, it processes the href attributes of all <a>, <link> or <area> elements. This is necessary, because normally a HTTP server translates directory URLs ending in “/” into requests for the corresponding index.html file, and without a HTTP server involved, Ucampas has to do the equivalent.
  • URLs generated by Ucampas are only made as relative URLs if the resulting relative pathname points to a file that actually exists in the local filesystem, otherwise a full, absolute URL is used. This is helpful in particular when accessing a partial copy of a website via file://, but can be inconvenient for users of HTTPS, as the absolute URL might switch the protocol.
google_analytics=text
Insert the Google Analytics Global Site Tag (gtag.js) tracking code with the provided measurement ID into the <head> element of the page. Example: google_analytics='UA-9999999-1' or google_analytics='G-XXXXXX'.
This parameter can be used to override the title that ucampas normally automatically extracts from an HTML document and uses as a link text for the corresponding page in auto-generated navigation information. This can be used to provide a shorter version of the page title for used in navigation links, or if the file concerned is not in HTML. This parameter is not inherited.
style=stylename
Selects the style template to be used for generating the output page. Currently, the values supported are “ucam2006”, “ucam2008”, and “ucam2012”, which are all based on different generations of the University web house style.
svninfo=boolean
Some styles append at the bottom of a page a line that says who made the last change to this page and when did this happen. This information is by default (svninfo=0) extracted from the ownership and last modified time of the source file. With svninfo=1 and there being a .svn subdirectory in the same directory as the source file (suggesting that the source file may be a Subversion working file), ucampas will try instead to use the "svn info" command to obtain the name of the last modifier and the date of the last modification (commit) from the Subversion repository. [This is in particular useful for setups where the subdirectory served by the web server is a Subversion working directory that is automatically updated after every commit by a post-commit hook script (usually using the commit-update.pl script that comes with ucampas).]
title=text
This parameter can be used to set or override the title of an HTML document. It can be used, for example, to replace an inappropriate title in an automatically generated *-b.html file. It can also be used to specify the titles of all pages in uconfig.txt rather than *-b.html files, to reduce the number of files ucampas has to read to build navigation content. This parameter is not inherited. If you only want to override the title as it appears in navigation content, but not the title of the page itself, then use navtitle instead.
obfuscate_email=boolean
With “obfuscate_email=1”, ucampas will remove from the HTML output file anything that looks like an email address, both [Javascript required] plain text and any mailto: link, and insert nearby <script> elements to restore the removed content on JavaScript-enabled clients, using code that contains the address as an obfuscated expression. The idea is to make it tedious to automatically harvest email addresses from ucampas-generated web pages, without using a JavaScript interpreter, as an anti-spam measure. This is best combined with measures to limit unauthorized access to *-b.html source files, for example using the Apache directive
<Files "*-b.html">
  Require valid-user
</Files>
umask=octal-number
An octal value that determines the “umask” setting applied by ucampas when it writes its output file. For example, “umask=0002” will ensure that the resulting file is readable to everyone and writable to both the file owner and members of the file’s group.
url=url
Tells ucampas under which URL the current page will be accessible via HTTP. When this parameter is inherited to subnodes, the provided URL path is automatically extended according to the relative path in the file system. Therefore, this parameter has to be specified only for a root node and for the root of any subtree that is located elsewhere in the file system (e.g., via a symbolic link). Knowing the URL of each page helps ucampas to make correct use of relative and absolute URLs in auto-generated navigation information.

In addition, the following parameters (also automatically inherited) are supported if “style=ucam2006”, “style=ucam2008”, or “style=ucam2012” has been selected; additional parameters are described in the documentation of each style:

If set to 1, adds above the main page content a list of “bread crumb” links to higher-level nodes in the navigation tree.
Adds additional entries at the start of the list of “bread crumb” links generated by breadcrumbs=1. This can be useful to refer to a higher-level node outside the current site. Example:
breadcrumbprefix=(
  *a(href="http://www.cam.ac.uk/", "University of Cambridge"),
  *a(href="http://www.cam.ac.uk/cambuniv/", "Departments")
)
Name of the copyright holder to be shown near the bottom of the page. This is by default "organization, University of Cambridge" (or simply "University of Cambridge" if organization is either not defined or is equal to the latter). Set copyright_holder="" to suppress the copyright message entirely.
Year(s) given right after the copyright symbol shown near the bottom of the page. This is by default the year of the last-modified date of the source file.
edit_url=url
URL of the CGI script to be called if the user clicks on the word “modified” at the very bottom of the page. [This feature is not yet fully implemented.]
edit_instructions=url
URL with instructions for how to edit a web page. [This feature is not yet fully implemented.]
Adds additional links at the bottom-right corner of the page. This is meant for legal boilerplates and the like. Example:
footlinks=(
  *a(href="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/privacy.html", "Privacy policy"),
)
lastmod=boolean
If set to 1, add a line at the bottom of the page that indicates who last modified it, and when when.
If set to 1, adds to the page a navigation menu, a tree of links to other nodes along the path in the navigation tree.
If set to 1, the normal navigation menu will not show any children of the current node. This is useful if links to the child nodes are (at that level) instead represented in some alternative fashion, for example using in-page links, or using in-page tabs generated via <div class="ucampas-tabs">.
If set to 1, makes the current page the top-level page of the tree of links generated by navbar=1. This can be used to detach a subsite (e.g., research-group pages) conceptually a bit better from the main site. Preferably use together with breadcrumbs=1, to keep the main site easily reachable. If set to larger values, make an ancestor of the current page the root of the displayed navigation tree: 2=parent, 3=grandparent, etc.
If set to 1 (or any other value than "" or 0), prefixes a link to the root of the navigation tree (i.e., “home”) at the start of the navigation bar. (Some users find that this helps them more easily to find their way back to the top of the current navigation tree than via the breadcrumbs.) If the value is not "1", then this text is used as the text of link, rather than the page title (e.g.: navtopinclude="Home").
organization=text
Set this to the main name of the organization represented by this page (e.g., the name of the department). This is then displayed in a larger font near the top of each page, and also prefixed to the title element of each page.
organization_subtitle=text
Some styles support a second (e.g., alternative or subordinate) name of the organization to be displayed, usually in a smaller font below the name of the organization, and this attribute then provides this name. May also be used for slogans.
section=text
If defined, sets the name of a section of the web site that will be displayed somewhere below organization and organization_subtitle. This can be used, for example, to name the research group or other departmental section in charge of these web pages, or to otherwise provide a common context for a group of closely related pages. This section name is also prefixed to the title element of each page (unless that would just repeat the same text).
webmaster=(name=text, url=url, email=address)
Provides contact details of whoever is in charge of the contents of this page at the bottom of the page, using a (style-dependent) phrase such as “Information provided by ...”. No all of the sub-parameters have to be provided, for instance if the name or url parameters are missing, they are generated automatically from the email address. Typical usage:
webmaster=(name="Markus Kuhn",
           url="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/#contact"),

Warning: Providing an email address on the web can attract a never-ending flood of unsolicited marketing messages (“spam”). To reduce the risk of an email address being collected by automated address-harvesting web crawlers, either activate option obfuscate_email or provide only a URL to a web page with human-readable contact details.

The following parameters are not inherited to subnodes:

invisible=integer
Write in a uconfig.txt file “subnodename(invisible=1)” if you want “ucampas -r” to recurse into that path without causing it to to become visible in the navigation side-bar. However, with invisible=1 the node remains visible in the sitemap. With invisible=2, the node will not even show up in the sitemap.
stoprecursion=boolean
Write in a uconfig.txt file “dirname(stoprecursion=1)” if you do not want “ucampas -r” to recurse into that path (e.g., because that subdirectory is owned by somebody else).
nosub=boolean
Set this parameter (to 1) if the current node is not a subdirectory that contains the files and directories of further subnodes, but if instead its subnodes are stored one level up (i.e., as siblings of the current node). This parameter is already implicitly set for any file ending in ".html". It can be used to keep URLs shorter than would be possible with a strict mapping between navigation-tree and subdirectory structure.
nopage=integer
Set this parameter (to 1) if the current node does not have an associated HTML file. Navigation links to such a node will then automatically be directed to its first subnode instead (or to the second subnode with nopage=2, or to its parent with nopage='-1', etc.)

Loading templates

The style=stylename parameter selects which style template ucampas uses to format a page (and its sub pages). Ucampas comes with some predefined templates, but you can also add your own (although the Perl API for doing so is not yet documented). A template consists a pair of files, which are typically called either “stylename.html” and “stylename.pl”, or alternatively “stylename/template.html” and “stylename/template.pl”. Both files must be in the same directory. Ucampas looks for these by default in a subdirectory “templates/” of its library directory. You can override where ucampas looks for the template files for each style=stylename by adding to uconfig.txt a parameter:

stylename={
  template='path',
}

Set the above to the relative or absolute path of the template files, but drop any trailing “.html”, “.pl”, “/template.html”, or “/template.pl”. You can use command-line option -T to restrict which directories ucampas is allowed to load templates from (such that contributors able to edit uconfig.txt files cannot inject unauthorized Perl commands by adding new templates).

Style-asset URLs

Style templates usually refer to other files that contain additional assets required to implement a style: images, style sheets, javascript libraries. The location of these can be specified with

style_url=url
Sets the HTTP directory where additional files (images, CSS, Javascript) required by the page style are found.

If you prefer to keep different asset classes in different directories, you can use instead the following parameters, which override any default set by style_url:

images_url=url
Sets the HTTP directory where the decorative GIF icons and images required by the page style are found, e.g. "https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/images/".
stylesheets_url=url
Sets the HTTP directory where the CSS style sheets required by the style of the page are found, e.g. "https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/style/".
javascript_url=url
Sets the HTTP directory where JavaScript files required by the style of the page are found, e.g. "https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/js/".

A complex web site might use different styles for different parts of the site, and to allow you to keep the assets associated with each style in separate directories, ucampas also allows you to specify the above parameters for just one style, by wrapping them in a parameter that has the name of the respective style. Example:

ucam2008={
  stylesheets_url="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/style/",
  images_url="https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/images/",
},

When looking for the asset URL to use, for example for image files for the ucam2008 style, ucampas actually looks along the uconfig.txt path to the root for any of the following:

  • ucam2008={images_url=...},
  • ucam2008={style_url=...},
  • images_url=...,
  • style_url=...,
  • images_url default set in the template.pl file

It stops at the first of these that exists. Likewise for stylesheets_url and javascript_url.

Command-line invocation and options

Ucampas is called with a list of absolute or relative path names. Any suffix “-b.html” or “.html” will be added or removed automatically, as necessary; the alternative extensions “.htm” and “.php” are handled similarly. If a provided path name is that of a directory, ucampas will attempt to process the “index-b.html” file found in it. If no pathname is provided, ucampas will process “index-b.html”.

The following command line options can be specified before this argument list:

-c 'parameters'
Add further configuration parameters, which are formatted and have the same effect as if they were placed into the uconfig.txt file for each of the following path names.
-d
After a page has been generated, invoke a web browser to display it. Specify the command line to invoke the web browser using parameter display.
--debug word,word,...
Output some internal data structures for debugging purposes, e.g.
  • nav lists the navigation tree compiled from all the read uconfig.txt files,
  • src shows the SGML parse tree from the input file.
-i
Append “index.html” to all relative directory URLs in the output file. This option is equivalent to: -c 'file_access=1'
-p
Execute any <?perl ... ?> processing instructions that are found embedded in the input HTML file. By default, these are only removed. [Future documentation will describe the PlexTree API via which such Perl code can manipulate both the HTML document tree and the navigation tree.]
-r
Recursively process also all the subnode files listed in the uconfig.txt file associated with each given input file. Does not recurse into *link hyperlinks.

Tip: To make sure that “ucampas -r” processes all pages of your web site, they all need to appear in a uconfig.txt file, even if you do not want them to appear in a navigation menu. In the latter case, use the invisible or navstop parameters to hide them from the menu. (Use the “ucampas-navtest” tool occasionally to search for orphaned web pages that are not mentioned in any uconfig.txt file, and would therefore never be refreshed by “ucampas -r”.)

Tip: Parameter stoprecursion blocks recursive descent into a subtree (useful, for example, if a subtree is owned by someone else).

-T path
Specify a directory path where ucampas is allowed look for template files. This option can be used multiple times to provide a list of permitted paths. It can be useful if ucampas runs as a privileged user, to ensure that someone with write access to a uconfig.txt file cannot gain the ability to cause ucampas to load and execute new template.pl files. If no option -T is provided, there are no restrictions where template files can be loaded from.

Author, history, getting help

Ucampas was written by Markus Kuhn, primarily during the second half of 2006, in preparation of the 2007 restructuring of the lab’s web site.

Contact Markus if you have any questions or suggestions, or join the mailing list cl-ucampas.