The bulk of the documents on the World Wide Web are static. That is, the documents are created in a form that is provided to the WWW browser which in turn creates a "picture" of what the document should look like. From time to time the pages are manually altered by the author and only then does what the user see change. The pages may contain content which moves around and such but the patterns are preset and the effect predefined.
A smaller portion of the documents on the WWW are dynamically created. A programmer creates software which runs on the server computer providing the static WWW pages to browser. This software is able to modify the information being sent to the user's WWW browser and change it according to a set of conditions. For instance, content could change based the current date.
Software designed to provide such dynamic content is often written to use the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) specification. This has allowed a large quantity of server-side programs to be developed for WWW hosts across the Internet.
However, the CGI specification covers only the very basic elements of server-side software. When you write or install this software you must normally make various changes to its source code in order to have it work correctly in a given environment. In some cases the changes are minor and involve specifying the file system paths to various binary files such as the message transfer agent. In other cases the changes are more major and can involve reworking a piece of system-specific code. This makes software installation a time consuming process and it may well be impossible in some cases for those without a solid background in software development.
Vaxxine has recognized these deficiencies and designed a system to help overcome them. Vaxxine's WWW Extension System understands a special type of file you can place in your WWW are on the server. Rather than having to write or install CGIs yourself Vaxxine has done so for software for just about any function you can think of, such as sending e-mail, password-protecting WWW pages, displaying a count of visitors, offering a guestbook for visitors to sign, etc. Many were written by Vaxxine, some were not.
These VXN files offer a simple and consistent way to specify all the information you need to have a dynamic page created. In as few as 4 simply formed lines you can have a customized user administration system page to allow you to add, change, and delete users that are permitted to access a set of WWW pages you own.