Current Version: 0.6 Beta (18th/02/05)
18/2/5 News: Beta 0.6 is out. Fixes several major bugs in 0.5. Please download if you struggling with 0.5. Note: mark-up for galleries has changed, you must use [:Gallery..] now.
24/10/4 News: Beta 0.5 is here. Many thanks to Mark Hollomon who is responsible for most of the bugs squashed and features added in this release.
14/7/4 News: Beta 0.4 is up. This version uses flat files rather than RCS. There is an upgrade process (consisting of clicking a button twice ;-) so watch out! Gunther no longer requires RCS.
7/5/4 News: Revision 2 of Beta 0.3 is Available. Fixes problem validating page names. All 0.3beta users should update 0.3beta2.
7/5/4 News: Gunther Version 0.3 Beta is Available
7/5/4 News: Added example of a Gunther generated photo gallery.
28/4/4 News: Gunther Version 0.2 Beta released.
28/4/4 News: Gunther 0.2 online demo is up.
Welcome to the home of the web-site creation tool, Gunther. Gunther is a set of PHP scripts that can be deployed on your web server and used to create, manage and easily maintain a website.
Gunther aims at a different target-market than most existing content management systems. Gunther is for those who want an instantly accessible tool to build small to medium sized websites and may want to provide others (clients, customers or friends) with an easily editable website. Gunther strives to provide the user with genuinely useful features such as automatic thumbnail generation for uploaded images, customisable page templates, automatic generation of image galleries and an easy-to-learn wiki-style markup language to format pages. Gunther can also be deployed with zero configuration and comes with a clean, elegant, functional default page template so a Gunther driven site will look great from the word go.
All editing is done from within the web browser by logging in to your site with a user-name and password. A Gunther powered site works much like a wiki, however, unlike a wiki, a Gunther driven site is not open to modifications by the general public and the owner must log-in before being able to make changes.
Gunther is released freely to all under the General Public License.
If you like and use Gunther, you might consider making a donation to the project.
Out of the box, Gunther provides you with a clean and flexible template and you can start adding content to your site immediately. When you're ready, you can turn to your favourite HTML editor and craft your own templates to use on your site.
Gunther Development
Gunther development is hosted on sourceforge.net. The SourceForge project name is gunther. The project page can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/gunther/.
Please note that Gunther is still in beta (it is in its early stages). It should not be relied upon for mission critical tasks. You should also back-up your site regularly. I cannot be responsible for you losing half your website! Having said that, Gunther is used to run live, production websites and performs well. It it used to run this website.
Have a look at Gunther's Tracker on SourceForge for a detailed view of current Gunther development.
Gunther is an open source project and I would be very pleased to hear from people who wish to contribute to the project. If you find something which looks like a bug within Gunther, please submit a report on SourceForge. Feature requests and support requests can also be submitted on the SourceForge project page.
Quick Introduction
Those familiar with the way a wiki works will be right at home with Gunther. Each page in a Gunther driven site is just a plain old block of text which is entered into a form. Each page is stored on the web server as an RCS (revision control system) file so all changes are logged. Simple mark-up (far simpler than HTML) symbols can be used to incorporate common formatting options such as bold, underline, embedding images etc. You can also easily make links between different pages on the site. Have a look at the Help page for a full listing and examples of the mark-up language. You can also use HTML freely within your pages.
Quick Feature List
- Web-based site management.
- Create and remove pages from your site.
- Easily create links between pages.
- Rename pages.
- Upload and embed images.
- Align images left and right.
- Very easy image gallery creation.
- Various styles, bold, underline, code, pre-processed, subscript, superscript header styles, text alignment.
- Create ordered and unordered lists.
- Create tables.
- Per cell alignment in tables.
- Row span and column span.
- Incorporate PHP script within pages.
- Add your own custom HTML to pages.
- Create thumbnails from uploaded images automatically.
- Create your own user templates.
- Choose a default user template.
- Choose a specific template for a page.
- Incorporate a fixed page into a template (create static elements such as a button bar).
- Upload images and resources to associate with a template.
Help
Help with installation.
Help with the template system.
Help with upgrading from a previous version.
There is a quick reference to the Gunther mark-up language.
I will be very pleased to help anyone trying to get a Gunther powered site running, just contact me by email.
Templates
Gunther comes with quite a nice default template for your pages. Undoubtedly, you will want to customise the way your site looks and you can create user templates (which are just HTML pages) to do this. You can use your favourite HTML editor to create you template and then insert special tags to determinte where, for example, the body and title should be placed. The most important two tags being {$page_title} and {$page_body} . Gunther uses Smarty to process templates and the special tags mentioned above are actually Smarty variables. Gunther passes various variable to Smarty which you can incorporate into your own template design. See the page Working With Templates for a detailed explanation of Gunther's interaction with Smarty and how to add images and button bars to templates.
Requirements
At the moment Gunther requires PHP 4.3 or greater. Gunther may not work if PHP is in safe-mode. Specifically, if your PHP scripts cannot write to directories owned by the webserver process (directories that Gunther creates) then Gunther won't work. A lot of safe-mode PHP installations don't enable this restriction and Gunther runs fine in that case.
I would recommend the hosting company Site5.com.
Download
All files released under the Gunther project are available on SourceForge. Indirection here.
Installation
Gunther is very easy to install. Instructions here. Gunther is very clever and tries very hard to infer its configuration from its surroundings. You do, of course, have to place Gunther on your website and maybe change a few directory permissions. Reasonably detailed installation instructions can be found within the downloadable archive but possibly more up-to-date information is kept on the website.
Contact the author
Thomas Riley can be contacted at tjriley(at)users.sourceforge.net.
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