Copyright (c) 1998 by Jonathan Swartz. All rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.

Welcome to Mason, a full-featured web site development and delivery
system.  Mason allows web pages and sites to be constructed from
shared, reusable building blocks called components. Components contain
a mix of Perl and HTML, and can call each other and pass values back
and forth like subroutines. Components increase modularity and
eliminate repetitive work: common design elements (headers, footers,
menus, logos) can be extracted into their own components where they
need be changed only once to affect the whole site.

Other Mason features include a graphical site previewing utility, an
HTML/data caching model, and the ability to walk through requests with
the Perl debugger.

To install Mason, run the standard sequence:

	perl Makefile.PL
	make
	make install

After Mason is installed, you will need to activate it by adding some
directives to your Apache configuration files, and customizing Mason's
Config.pm and eg/handler.pl files to match your system.

The included pod docs have been pre-converted to HTML for you and
placed in the htdocs/ directory. The Mason overview (a good place to
start) is in Mason.html.

Mason was originally developed for the Internet technology group at
CMP Media, a publisher of technology magazines. Mason currently
handles 90% of the traffic on CMPnet (http://www.cmpnet.com), a
network of technology-based sites including TechWeb
(http://www.techweb.com) and FileMine (http://www.filemine.com).  CMP
has graciously supported our efforts to release Mason as open source
software to the Perl community.  However, CMP has NO direct
involvement with the open source release and bears NO responsibility
for its support or maintenance.

Mason is provided "as is" and without any express or implied
warranties, including, without limitation, the implied warranties of
merchantibility and fitness for a particular purpose.  Mason is
released under the same terms as Perl itself.  For more information
see the "README" or "Artistic" files provided with the Perl
distribution.

Send feedback, questions, bug reports, etc. to the mod_perl list
(modperl@apache.org; see http://perl.apache.org for more information);
that way other folks will benefit from the communciation. Or, if you
prefer, send directly to swartz@transbay.net.

For all bug reports indicate your architecture, Apache/Perl/module
versions, etc. For installation problems send your handler.pl and
httpd.conf. For component problems try to isolate the bug in a single
small component or set of components, and send those.
