$Id: README,v 1.6 1999/04/14 11:48:06 ecila40 Exp $

What is it ?
------------
Catalog is a perl program that allows to create, maintain and display
Yahoo! like directories. The user interface is 100% HTML. It requires a
MySQL database to run.

The general idea behind the design of Catalog is that creating a catalog
is mainly a matter of organizing objects in a structured tree. For
Catalog the objects are records in a table of the SQL database. 
The structured tree is a set of tree nodes and relations between these
nodes. The maintainer of the catalog is in charge of building the tree
and placing objects in this tree.

Here is a short list of the functions provided by Catalog:

* Display structured trees of resources.
* Display chronologically ordered resources and associated calendar.
* Display alphabetical indexes of resources.
* Allow full text search in the resources and the category names.
* Powerful HTML based administration of catalogs.
* On-Line editing of resource records.
* Handle an arbitrary number of catalogs.
* High performances using mod_perl and Apache.
* Easy customization of the user view using HTML template files.
* It is possible to define more than one view of the same catalog.
* Load and unload a thematic catalog in XML.
* Create an HTML dump of a structured tree to publish a static 
  version.
* Complete documentation including a guide and a reference manual.
* Ready to use example.

Where is the documentation ?
----------------------------

If you have installed Catalog, it is on your local machine 
(see the Where is it installed section below). If you didn't
install Catalog, you can take a look at http://www.senga.org/.

How to install it ?
-------------------
See the INSTALL file for installation instructions.

Where is it installed ?
-----------------------

The main program is a file named Catalog that is installed in the
cgi-bin directory of the HTTP server running on your local machine.

The HTML documentation starts with a file named catalog_toc.html in the
HTML tree of the HTTP server running on your local machine (the path
you specified with the HTMLDIR variable when installing Catalog).


Where can I download it ?
-------------------------
The Catalog home page is http://www.senga.org/download.html

Loic Dachary
loic@senga.org
http://www.senga.org/
