Site structure

The site you are on right now is actually built with Open Site Builder basing on the template provided by Google Page Creator. The only page maintained by means of GPC is a home page. Current GPC design dictate that at least the home page must be maintained by GPC but all other pages needn't. Here we will describe how the OSB site was built.

The first step is to download and install Open Site Builder so that you could access it in your browser by entering the following address:

http://localhost/path-to-osb/osb.php

OSB is a PHP program and needs PHP installed on your machine. If you do not have PHP (and Apache) installed you may use the official PHP package from http://www.php.net/ and Apache distribution from http://httpd.apache.org/ or use one of the integrated packages available on the net, like WAMP5, EasyPHP or many others that install and configure Apache/PHP/Mysql in seconds.

Our file structure is as follows:

index.html          (Home page, maintained by GPC)
start.html          (Introduction)
tutorial.html       (Tutorial)
reference.html      (Reference)
support.html        (Support)
links.html          (Links)

There are some more companion files:

flow1.png           (Template-Content-Target image)
g_hacks.css         (GPC browser hacks)
g_theme.css         (GPC theme layout)
menu-sample.png     (Menu sample for Introduction page)
osb.css             (Our own CSS markup)
osbtools-sitemap.xml(Sitemap file for the site)

The navigation is represented by a right sidebar menu and contains links to each page of a website. The current page in menu is unlinked. Download menu position is the only link that points to the outside resource and thus does not need any more maintenance. Other positions (like Introduction or Tutorial) need to have two representations: standard (linked) and active (unlinked) form. Then on each page we will define which position will be using its active (unlinked) form. Other positions will by default be represented by links.