2. External Documents and Tools
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## 2. External Documents and Tools

One of the reasons that led to the creation of MeshCMS was the need to manage hundreds of HTML documents created previously, and to be able to add some Microsoft Word documents if needed. As a consequence, MehsCMS accepts any HTML file that it finds while exploring the website directory to create the site map. Thanks to the power of SiteMesh, pages created in different ways are parsed and decorated, while the title can be extracted to be used in the site menu.

Some MeshCMS users constantly upload Word documents converted to HTML, while others edit pages directly on the web using external tools like Macromedia Contribute, which they can find more comfortable than using the online editor provided by MeshCMS.

This approach has led to some choices that are different from the ones made for other CMSes. For example, there's no need to specify in which order pages must be inserted in the navigation menu. While one can prefer to take full control of that order, this is really tedious when dealing with hundreds of documents. MeshCMS automatically puts the welcome file at the beginning on the list and then orders the other pages according to the number of visits in the last days. This brings the most requested documents at the beginning of the list.

The Page Manager tool offers an option to assign a score to each page anyway. Pages with higher score will always come first, regardless of the count of visits. It is a tedious process to use scores to order the whole site map, and it is not a user-friendly method at all. But partial orderings are allowed: default score is zero for all pages, so one can assign a score just to those pages that he wants to see at the beginning (positive score) or at the end (negative score) of the list. Pages with the same score are ordered according to the number of visits.

Most users assign a score to first-level pages (for example: home page, company profile, products and finally contacts), while subpages are left without score.

Another consequence of the need to support documents that come from many sources is that MeshCMS does not check them for standard compliance. It respects the generalistic approach that is allowed by SiteMesh. Of course, a web developer is still allowed to put document type definitions in his own themes and to require his users to deal with well-formed documents only.

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