MapServer TEMPLATE
"Templates" is the simplest way to create an interactive mapserver site. (You can create non-interactive ones without templates but what's the fun of that?)
The non-interacttive example
Without using a template, I (the masterful Web GIS progreammer) can create a .map file and put the appropriate URL onto a Web page, for example,
Reading the URL from left to right. this goes to my mapserver(http://mapserver.wildsong.biz/), invokes the mapserv executable (/cgi-bin/mapserv), telling it read a map file (map=../mapserver/html/demo/hello.map), look for the 'credits' layer("layer=credits"), and finally to display the results by sending the image back to your browser ("mode=map").
I am keeping my files for this project in the html directory tree so that you can download them if you want to look at them. For security normally I would keep them OUTSIDE the tree... just because...
So for example, you can grab the map file with this URL: http://mapserver.wildsong.biz/demo/hello.map
The first template
I walked through the MapServer template reference and created a template file that has most of the template tags in it. You can look at it; click here and do view source: http://mapserver.wildsong.biz/demo/hello.template.html
To tell MapServer to use my template file, I can change mode to browse and add a template specifier:
I have to specify a layer; that example just shows you a blue box;
The template has lots of mapserver template tags in it, which are a word enclosed by square brackets. They look like wiki tags, come to think of it.
