Copyright (c) 1998 by Jonathan Swartz. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. Welcome to Mason, a full-featured web site development and delivery system. Mason allows web pages and sites to be constructed from shared, reusable building blocks called components. Components contain a mix of Perl and HTML, and can call each other and pass values back and forth like subroutines. Components increase modularity and eliminate repetitive work: common design elements (headers, footers, menus, logos) can be extracted into their own components where they need be changed only once to affect the whole site. Other Mason features include a graphical site previewing utility, an HTML/data caching model, and the ability to walk through requests with the Perl debugger. To install Mason, run the standard sequence: perl Makefile.PL make make install After Mason is installed, you will need to activate it by adding some directives to your Apache configuration files, and customizing Mason's Config.pm and eg/handler.pl files to match your system. The included pod docs have been pre-converted to HTML for you and placed in the htdocs/ directory. The Mason overview (a good place to start) is in Mason.html. Mason was originally developed for the Internet technology group at CMP Media, a publisher of technology magazines. Mason currently handles 90% of the traffic on CMPnet (http://www.cmpnet.com), a network of technology-based sites including TechWeb (http://www.techweb.com) and FileMine (http://www.filemine.com). CMP has graciously supported our efforts to release Mason as open source software to the Perl community. However, CMP has NO direct involvement with the open source release and bears NO responsibility for its support or maintenance. Mason is provided "as is" and without any express or implied warranties, including, without limitation, the implied warranties of merchantibility and fitness for a particular purpose. Mason is released under the same terms as Perl itself. For more information see the "README" or "Artistic" files provided with the Perl distribution. Send feedback, comments, bug reports, etc. to the mod_perl list (see http://perl.apache.org for information) or to jswartz@transbay.net. For all bug reports indicate your architecture, Apache/Perl/module versions, etc. For installation problems send your handler.pl and httpd.conf. For component problems try to isolate the bug in a single small component or set of components, and send those.