Automate Your Web Pages

WebvantaScript

WebvantaScript is the Webvanta system's markup language that gives you access to database content and other server-side functions. You can use it interchangeably with HTML in templates, snippets, and content regions.

In this article, we explain how to use WebvantaScript and provide a variety of examples.

Note: WebvantaScript is derived from the Radius tag language created for the Radiant content management system. WebvantaScript is a superset of Radius; it includes many more tags, and has a variety of additional capabilities.

Accessing Database Contents

With a few WebvantaScript instructions, you can access content stored in the content management system or in the database. We've provided sample code for category, list, and item pages to create a typical knowledgebase site (in the pages of those names, in the kb page group), as well as for a resources page (in the resources_page snippet, and included in the default Resources page).

If you're using our standard knowledgebase item types (articles, blog posts, and links to other blogs, events, books, and so forth) you'll probably want to start with our category, list, and item pages and modify them to customize the presentation. If you're using custom item types, you'll need to create your own WebvantaScript to display database information.

WebvantaScript Structure

Each WebvantaScript statement (sometimes called a Webvanta tag) has the following structure:

<w:tagname parameter=value parameter=value ... >

All statements begin with <w: followed by the name of the tag. In some cases, that's all that's required.

Often, however, you want to specify one or more parameters, which you do simply by entering the name of the parameter, followed by an equal sign, followed by the value of the parameter. If the value is a string, it must be in quotes.

Webvanta tags must be correct XML, which means that they must all be closed. Some can be self-closing:

<w:tagname parameter=value />

Note the slash before the close bracket. It is required for a self-closing tag (just as in XHTML).

Some tags are designed to surround a block of text or other code. In this case, the opening tag is of the form:

<w:tagname parameter=value />

And then, after some amount of other content or code, a closing tag is required, which looks like this:

</w:tagname>

Again, this is just like XHTML.

WebvantaScript Details

For more information about using WebvantaScript, refer to the following articles on specific uses: