SPLCMS Introduction and Screenshots

SPLCMS is one of the example applications from the WebSPL framework, which is part of SPL. It is a small CMS (Content Management System) in less then 500 lines of SPL code. The sources can be browsed here.

SPLCMS is a simple Content Management System written in SPL. It is using XML for storing the actual content and XSLT for rendering static HTML files.
The administrator can define his own objects for representing the content objects. This object definitions are stored in the classes.xml file. Users can then create and modify such content objects using the editor backend (splcms.webspl).
The actual HTML files are rendered using the render.xsl XSLT file. This XSLT is processed for every output HTML file.
The rendering process is triggered by clicking on the "(Re-)Render HTML Files" button in the editor backend or by manually executing the render.spl script.

The classes.xml file contains the descriptions of the content object classes. Each content object class has a name, a list of allowed child classes, a short definition for automatically creating object titles in the editing backend and a list of parameters. This parameters are the actual data tuples assoziated with an object.
Each object is represented as an XML node in the data.xml file. The class name is used as XML element name in the file.
Each parameter again has a name, a type and some information for the editing backend how a parameter should be displayed in the backend. The type is eigther attribute or element. The attribute parameters are stored directly in the object XML element as XML attributes, the element parameters are stored as child elements.
Have a look at the example classes.xml file. It is pretty much self explainatory.

The XSLT renderer is implemented in the seperate script file render.spl. This makes it easier to make local modification to the rendering process.
This script creates a list of all <page> elements in the data.xml file and is processing render.xsl for each <page> element. The output of the XSLT is then written to an HTML file named after the name= attribute of the <page> element. So, if you would like to use render.spl unmodified you need to specify a page class in your classes.xml and this class needs to have a name parameter of the attribute type. The HTML files are stored in the html/ directory.
The page name is passed as XSLT parameter page to the XSLT.
The files from the static/ directory (usually images and the CSS file) is automatically symlinked to the html/ directory.
Additional logic (such as fetching external RSS feeds) can be easily added to the render.spl script.