Automated web site creation

If you think about everything we've discussed so far, the idea of auto-inheritance is almost obvious.

Almost...

What does auto-inheritance mean? As a part of its normal behavior, engenu inherits everything it can. You can manually edit particular form fields, but you don't have to. Even on heavily-edited pages, you will accept most of the inherited fields most of the time.

From there, we can reach two conclusions:

First, many web pages and web sites could be inherited as-is and no one would be the wiser.

Second, if you prepare your folder and image names well, an auto-inherited engenu site can be a thing of wonder.

There's actually even more to auto-inheritance than that, but let's bite off a piece at a time.

Inheritance by design

When you manually enter an engenu folder for the first time, what happens?Here's a question: What missing from that page?

There's no body copy, for one thing. If there is no title supplement or supplemental sidebar to be inherited, those will be empty. No images means no slide-show. And no sub-folders or PDF files leaves the sidebar empty.

But even if you enter a completely empty folder and then Save and Exit, you will have created a perfectly valid web page -- all by inheritance.

If instead you enter a folder that has images, sub-folders, PDF files -- as well as a copyable title supplement and supplemental sidebar -- when you Save and Exit from that page, you will have inherited an engenu web page that has everything an engenu page can have except body copy and offsite links.

Do you see? Not only is most of the work you are doing in engenu done by inheritance, there is no reason that all of that work cannot be done by inheritance.

And there's more: Recall that you can completely reconfigure an engenu web site simply by moving sub-hierarchies around within the folder hierarchy. When you do this, you can reinherit the linking relationships manually -- and you will amazed at how few pages are affected. But you can just as easily auto-reinherit the structure -- in many cases without doing any manual follow-up editing.

More still: Imagine building a web site sub-hierarchy by sub-hierarchy, adding new folders full of folders every day. With auto-inheritance, you can add those sub-hierarchies painlessly, incorporating them into your standing web site in seconds.

Not hours. Not minutes. Seconds.

How does auto-inheritance work?

It works "down'...

Seriously. It works "down" from wherever you happen to be in the hierarchy. So if you want your entire hierarchy to use the same title supplement and supplemental sidebar, you can use the versions stored at the top level of your hierarchy or in the engenuComponents folder and those files will inherit "down" into every folder below your top level.

Remember that your sub-folder and PDF file links are going to inherit "up", so, presumably, you will simply be inheriting the names you have given those sub-folders and PDF files. In the next section we'll talk about how to suss inheritance in either direction.

But suppose that instead of using the same title supplement and supplemental sidebar for an entire hierarchy, you want to use different versions of those files in each sub-hierarchy. What should you do?

Simple: Create the versions of the title supplement and supplemental sidebar you want in a particular sub-hierarchy, then auto-inherit "down" from there. The other sub-hierarchies will be unaffected until you do the same thing in each sub-hierarchy, creating unique title supplement and supplemental sidebar files and inheriting those "down" from there. When you are done, you can create yet another set of title supplement and supplemental sidebar files at the top level of the hierarchy, inheriting those down into any remaining unedited folders.

A closer look at auto-inheritance

These are the switches that control auto-inheritance -- and if this section is not completely clear to you, leave these switches alone.



You will only see these switches in a folder that has subfolders. You can't inherit "down" if there is no way down from where you are.

Note also that the folder you are in will not be affected by auto-inheritance. By definition, you are manually editing that page, even if you have changed nothing beyond the fields engenu auto-inherited on the way in. This probably only matters in one respect: If you are auto-inheriting photo captions in the folders below your current folder, you might also want to check the switch above the photo editor to inherit the photo captions within that folder.

The switches are verbosely self-documenting, but they make an important distinction: Are we concerned with unedited folders, with previously edited folders -- or with both?

If you are working with a folder hierarchy for the first time, it seems likely that every folder below the one your are in is unedited. If you check the first box, you will inherit those folders using the default engenu logic. If you check the second box, you will inherit the names of the image files as their photo captions, minus the extension. Most images have arbitrary names, but if you have named your images intelligently, you can inherit that intelligence without having to retype the name. Note that underbars in a file name will convert to spaces in the caption for that image -- as well as for its alt tag.

If you are reinheriting an existing sub-hierarchy into a new location -- or if you have added or removed folders or images -- you can reinherit everything very quickly by selecting the third switch. The fourth switch will auto caption any previously uncaptioned images.

engenu can intelligently distinguish unedited from previously edited folders, so if you are both adding and moving sub-hierarchies, you can auto-inherit both at once by checking both the first and third boxes -- checking both the second and fourth boxes to auto-caption all the uncaptioned images.

So where would you use auto-inheritance?

If the structure of your web site is highly rigorous and self-defining -- imagine a tour of previewed houses -- or a parts catalog -- then auto-inheriting a previously unedited folder hierarchy makes great sense. Even if you have to go in to make minor edits, you can save yourself a ton of time.

If you need to reinherit a previously-edited folder structure, this can also make great sense. At the point at which a new or moved sub-hierarchy is grafted onto the older folder structure, you may have to manually edit the sidebar links, but the rest of the structure will auto-inherit "in place."

Auto-inheritance is the single most powerful feature in engenu. It takes the built-in inheritance power of engenu and supercharges it. Once you master this feature, you will literally be able to produce dozens of web pages per second.