Databases are great places tostash information, and the Web is a great place to publish databases. Yet the options for translating a database’s contents into Web pages have been extremely limited. Fourth World Media’s WebMerge 1.6.2 changes the equation. This inexpensive program takes the contents of any database that can be exported as Merge or tab-delimited files (including FileMaker Pro and Microsoft Excel documents) and converts those contents into standard Web pages.
WebMerge creates an individual Web page, based on an HTML template you can make using any Web authoring program, for each record in the file you export. You simply add a special tag to the Web page’s code wherever you want WebMerge to insert content from the database (though you can’t add logic, such as IF-THEN statements, to templates).
While the static pages WebMerge creates are snapshots of your database rather than a live look at its contents, the program makes it fast and easy to regenerate pages whenever your data changes. Best of all, redesigning your site is as easy as editing the template file and then regenerating the pages.
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If you have vital information trapped inside a database application, you may well find that WebMerge is an incredibly quick and easy tool for freeing your data and putting it on the Web.