1 What is WebLTX?
WebLTX is a slim and lightweight framework for publishing scientific content on the internet. It was modelled on LaTeX, which is the standard for print media for decades. Contrary to LaTeX, WebLTX produces no PDF but cross-linked websites like this one. Similar to LaTeX is that WebLTX can automatically produce numbers for equations, figures and headlines. Furthermore, it formats the output and creates links when needed. Formulas can be inserted in LaTeX syntax because of MathJax. Since version 1.0, WebLTX supports BibTeX files and permalinks.
The content is written in HTML instead of LaTeX markup language. Additionally, WebLTX needs no separate compiling step, that means that every change in the HTML code is immediately visible after a browser refresh. WebLTX needs only PHP but no databases. For that reason, it can be used on almost every web server. Here is an example for a website which was created with WebLTX.
WebLTX was developed, to support a fast, free and professional distribution of new scientific ideas. It is freely available under terms of the GNU General Public License. WebLTX can be downloaded here.
2 Installation
2.1 Installing WebLTX
The installation is easy. In the first step the files of the framework have to be copied into the content directory of the web server software. For more details please look into its documentation. In the second step, WebLTX should be configured by editing the file user_settings.php in the root directory of WebLTX. Banner, favicon, template file and the CSS files are located in versions/$(VERSIONNBR)/template.
2.2 Internal structure of WebLTX
WebLTX has only a few files which are located, except of index.php and user_settings.php, in subdirectories.
src | Contains the PHP source code. Usually, the user should not need to change anything here. |
versions/$(VERSIONNBR)/template | Contains files which influence the look of the website. The user can adapt these files freely. |
versions/$(VERSIONNBR)/content | The content. The folder has always one or more subdirectories with different language codes, like en for English or de for German. Possible languages can be defined in file user_settings.php. |
versions/$(VERSIONNBR)/cache | Is created by the framework itself. It contains temporary files which accelerate the execution. It is possible to delete the cache at any time. |
log | The automatically created logfile directory. |