New to WML - Site structure and perl question [quite long]

[nospam@thanx (Jean-Charles Bagneris)]

Hello,

I am new to WML, and on my way to migrate a website I did with an old
version of Frontier (5.0 on Windows).

Things are going smoothly, thanks to the excellent and huge doc. Still, I
have two questions :

1. Structure
I want to separate the html output from the wml source.
What I did so far is :

/somedir/source  : root directory for wml sources, templates, etc.
.wmlrc is here, content :
-DJcB_Root~.
-I.
JcB_Root is of course my "root variable".

/somedir/source/foo, /somedir/source/bar, ... : subdirs of
/somedir/source, with tons of xxx.wml inside.

/somedir/pages : root directory for html output.
Of course, I want it to host /somedir/pages/foo, somedir/pages/bar, etc.

Any of my wml source starts with the shebang
#!wml -o ../pages/%BASE.htm

But I still have to modify this line by hand for subdirs :
#!wml -o ../../pages/foo/%base.htm

I am sure I missed something - i.e. wml may automagically understand where
it should put the html output with a better shebang line / .wmlrc
combination.

In addition, I would like to use wmk, thus a triplet (shebang line,
.wmlrc, .wmkrc) would be welcome.

2. Perl (?) question
I don't know Perl, I am not a programmer, but I may learn - at least
enough to "script".
I am not sure Perl is the asnwer to my problem - your opinion is welcome
here.
One of the page is a "news page". "News" are text file messages (msgxx.txt),
sent to a closed mailing list, and posted on top of the "news page".

Thus I need a few line of Perl code which would read any msgxx.txt file in
a given directory, pass it through a template and render it in the current
page, sorted in reverse xx order (last = greater xx on top).

I am sure this is a very common question - any hint or url or whatever
welcome.

Thanks in advance

Note : This is WML Version 1.7.4 (06-Oct-1999)
PS : Any archives of the list ?
-- 
Jean-Charles Bagneris
PGP/GnuPG public key : http://perso.mnet.fr/jcb
Cryptographie ? http://www.geocities.com/openpgp/index.html
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