The T-Files are actually a side-product of my quest for an easy-to-use tool to generate and maintain a fully static website, which I plan to use to redesign my PerlPad project page.

I want to have a static page because I intend to re-use most of the PerlPad site for the online help system (and of course I do not want to unnecessarily tax SourceForge's resources with a CGI script). It seems much easier these days to find content management systems that require some server-side processing using Perl, Java, PHP or something similar than a good tool to produce static content. I can see the advantages of these tools, which basically boil down to user feedback and online editing capabilities. I cannot really claim to have any measurable user community for PerlPad (yet!) so I do not need these features. Even if I did, I would probably prefer to use SourceForge's own forum systems.

Having said this, I did look into Wiki and weblog systems, but both seemed not to quite fit my purpose. I started using blosxom for this site, however, and was excited about its concept of keeping everything simple, which made me rule out all of the very sophisticated XML-transformation tools that would have been candidates for the job. Ideally, the tool I want would not be a general purpose text processor, but rather something specifically geared towards making websites (or even project documentation websites) that would facilitate making common tasks like creating navigational links and sitemaps. I would also appreciate sample templates I could just use since my own interest in web design is limited at best.

I decided to give HTML::WebMake a try. Just for the record, I also spend some time evaluating the following tools, which all seem useful:

• DocBook with website extension
• FreeMarker with FMPP
• Apache Forrest (based on Cocoon)
• Apache Anakia(based on Velocity)
• XWeb
• DML