If you want to get started hosting Manila sites and administering your server, see the list of server admin HowTos . Understanding Frontier A simplified but useful way to look at Frontier is as a layer cake. Manila is the icing.
Manila relies on mainResponder heavily.
Manila's preferences pages are implemented by prefs.root, an application that turns XML into HTML forms. Lower-level support for things like outline serialization and XML text parsing is present too. The webserver framework is what makes Frontier a Web server. The website framework implements templating, macros, automatic URL expansion, includes, outline rendering, and more. In a sense, Manila is a friendly front end to the website framework.