Robopages Big Picture

The robopages documention uses layouts/roboBook.xml as the layout, rather than the default layouts/robo.xml The roboBook layout is a good way to organize the documentation. roboBook does depend on the properly-formatted existence of a p2n file (fragments/Documentation/p2n in this case), which specifies the ordering of the 0..N pages in a book.

Robopages was developed as a rapid application way to make complex online documentation for online instructional pages. The roboBook.xml layout extends the default layout so it appears more book-like, complete with collapsible Table of Contents, nextPage prevPage lastReadPage buttons.

For developers, rapid application is good no matter what. Robopages websites that do not use a database are fast to make and fast to run. So they can be left as is--and they can be expected to scale well too. But some developers might want to use Robopages as fast way to hack out a new layout. And then, once done, to export that newly developed content and layout to a more cumbersome system like Drupal or Wordpress.

Robopages uses hierarchical HTML fragment files to create its contents. You can edit content in place with a text editor or with shell scripts. You can continuously rearrange structure by moving files and directories up or down in the server-side file system--without modifying codes. The navigation gets created robotivcally.