The TT Web Site Manager is a collection of PHP scripts which should run on any web server platform for which a port of PHP version 4 is available. It also requires a database server. The TT Web Site Manager supports installable code modules using the poptasticDB database connectivity functions which allow it to work with any database server for which a module has been written. The default distribution is shipped with a code module supporting MySQL servers.

It was written as a reaction to the experience of creating managed web sites with traditional content mamagement systems or by creating bespoke scripts for each site function. The bespoke route created exactly the desired specification but at the expense of a lot of hard work, while the content managers made certain tasks such as form driven database tables or working with preset articles or topics very easy at the expense of an inflexible environment when tailor-made code was needed. In particular some of the template and theme based content managers simply created a strait-jacket for the hapless developer unlucky enough to be landed with a project driven by one of them. Have you ever wondered why so many sites driven by some content managers look almost identical?

By contrast, the TT Web Site Manager was created to allow a mixture of a straightforward interface for database driven content and the flexibility to include whatever special code might be needed without the system getting in the way. It has no content management features built in so it is not a content manager but the easy access to the database it provides allows bespoke content management scripts to be created without the hard work.

TT Web Site Manager sites are created and managed through a series of administration scripts while the final pages as seen by a visitor to the site are built on the fly by a page build script. The page build script can be called in two ways. It can be instructed which page to build by having a variable passed to it, or for the bold among you the system can be configured so that the URL called by the user is passed to the page build script directly, allowing virtual pages to be served from the database without the URL betraying the absence of a real file. This functionality is not proven reliable in the current version of the TT Web Site Manager though.

The pages are built by allowing a site adminsitrator to create a library of code items which they can then string together in any order. These code items can be any of several types, HTML, PHP, SQL, a mixture of PHP and SQL or a simple conditional. This flexibility to move between HTML, PHP and SQL at will with no extra scripting means that complex dynamic server driven web pages can be created with a minimum of effort.

A single instance of the TT Web Site Manager can serve a number of sites held on the same web server. For example, if a single physical server is accessible as both http://www.domain_name_1 and http://www.domain_name_2 then both URLs can have their own completely separate set of database driven web pages on the same instance of the TT Web Site Manager on that server. A TT Web Site Manager site can be exported as an XML file and imported into another TT Web Site Manager installation, allowing developers to develop their sites offline and move them to online servers when they are ready.

The library of code items is managed by allowing the user to create a series of item containers to sort them. These containers and the code items within them are available to all the pages and sites served by that instance of the TT Web Site Manager.

The 4 key parts of the system are sumarised thus: A TT Web Site Manager installation can serve one or more Sites comprising of Pages, built from a library of code Items stored in Item containers.