Subtitles of the Movie

FileMaker Server Advanced comes bundled with a few extra tools. In this movie we will have a look at those goodies. The first one is a tool to check your deployment and to test if all the enabled technologies work as expected. FileMaker Server comes with a sample file that gets installed automatically and it is preconfigured to allow all possible types of access through FileMaker Pro, instant web publishing, through XSLT, XML calls, PHP and ODBC JDBC. You can tell, of course, by the checkmarks. FileMaker Server offers us a test page to test all of these access types except ODBC. From the Server Admin Console, you can open it by choosing Server and then clicking on the Open Test Page. Or if you don't have the Admin Console open, you can always go to that page directly through this URL, which is the IP Address or DNS name of the server, port 16000, then forward /test. The links on this page will open the test file to the different types of technologies. This is instant web publishing. This is a PHP sample and this is an XSLT sample. And this is the sample file opened in FileMaker Pro. In addition to being a good check, right after the installation this is always a good place to fall back on if you're troubleshooting problems in all the files. The second tool has to do with custom web publishing. FileMaker offers through pre-baked means of doing custom web publishing, namely through XSLT style sheets, which has been available since FileMaker Server 7 and through PHP, which was released with FileMaker Server 9. In FileMaker's spirit of being cross-platform, they have chosen these two technologies specifically because they run the same on both Windows and Mac. That isn't to say that you can't do web publishing through other technologies like ASP.NET, Flash, Flex or Ruby, to name just a few. That's all possible through FileMaker's XML and ODBC engine. We'll cover all of that in another movie. But back to XSLT and PHP. To help you get started quickly with web publishing, FileMaker Server gives you a site assistant to quickly create either an XSLT or a PHP website based on your current solution. And then you can use those websites as is or you can use them as a start and tweak them manually. So let's go find those tools. If you happen to have the Admin Console open, you can go to the Server in the menu and then go to the Start Page. Or if you don't have the Admin Console open, you can always go to that page directly, which is again the IP Address or DNS name of the FileMaker Server on port 16000 and then forward /index. If you scroll down a bit, you'll see a link to the PHP site assistant and the XSLT site assistant and from here you can start both. If you have FileMaker Pro Advanced 9 or 10, you can launch the site assistant from inside the application. To do that you go to the Menu under Tools and you can Launch PHP Assistants. In FileMaker Pro Advanced 9, you will just launch the site assistant test page, but in FileMaker Pro Advanced 10, it will actually launch the full PHP site assistant tool itself. So these are the tools that come extra with FileMaker Server. There's a test page to confirm that your installation works properly and there is a site assistant to help you create XSLT or PHP websites based on your solution.