CGI and PL: Advanced applications for use in your website

CGI (Common Gateway Interface)
PL (Perl Script)

NOTE: In order to use CGI or PL scripts you must have access to your server's /CGI-BIN/ directory. Some servers, such as ValueWeb or TABNet, allow users to have access to their own /CGI-BIN/ directory. Others, such as America Online do not. (America Online members do have access to AOL's pre-programmed CGI-BIN scripts.) This is important because in order to get a CGI or PL script to work, they must be configured correctly and in the correct directory.

What the heck is CGI or PL??

Glad you asked. CGI (Common Gateway Interface) and PERL (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language) (*.pl) are languages that implement an advanced function. For example, whenever you go to a search engine (www.yahoo.com) and do a search on "cats", the search engine uses a CGI script to find all 12,334,930 listings containing the word "cats". Other examples include; webpage hit counter, form processing, auto-response on e-mail, image mapping, and guest book. For more comprehensive information on CGI scripts, how they work, how to use them, etc., jump over to Matt's Script Archive at:

http://www.scriptarchive.com/scripts/

For additional help on any of the scripts, please visit:

http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/help/

What comes with the Editor??

The Editor provides the following scripts:

• CGI/PL - Animation
• CGI/PL - FormMail
• CGI/PL - Guestbook
• CGI/PL - Links
• CGI/PL - Search

Each has its own readme.txt file. It is very important that you always view the readme.txt file to learn how to use each script effectively. Otherwise, you will not be able to execute the script.