WebMerge 2.1

You don’t need an expensive, complicated database system to generate a Web site populated with massive amounts of data — especially if the site doesn’t need to be linked to a live database. Fourth World Media’s WebMerge 2.1 lets you quickly generate dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of Web pages based on the contents of a FileMaker Pro database, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or just about any other application that can export delimited text files.

WebMerge merges your data into HTML templates that contain special tags wherever you want to insert data into your pages. WebMerge’s language of tags gives you flexibility in transmuting data into HTML-ready format quickly. The program is also speedy; it generated hundreds of fairly complicated pages for us in less than 20 seconds.

Welcome improvements since version 1.6 (Reviews, November 2001) include support for conditional statements in templates, automatic creation of Next and Previous links, and support for multiple index pages. These and other improvements make WebMerge 2.1’s templates much more capable of generating sophisticated Web pages that change based on the data poured into them. The result is an easy, low-cost way to create a database-derived Web site that doesn’t require any complex Web database infrastructure.