Alkaline does not treat various content-types differently. Once Alkaline fetches the template document, it parses it for specific tags to render search results. The template can be html, xml or any other format. Alkaline does not support the common gateway interface (cgi) and will not execute php or cgi scripts explicitely.
To render php or cgi documents, use an .aln file and the global.cnf CacheTemplates option.
An aln file contains a url to an html document rather than the document itself. Place the php or cgi script on your regular web server, for example http://www.foo.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi . Create a search.aln instead of a search.html file. For example, if you search with http://www.foo.com:9999/bar/search.html , the new search url is http://www.foo.com:9999/bar/search.aln . The aln file must contain a single line with an url of the real search templace, hence http://www.foo.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi .
By default, Alkaline caches the template pages in memory. Add CacheTemplates = N to your global.cnf file to disable caching and query your web server for the search.cgi document for every request.
When a search is performed, the user's browser queries the Alkaline server. The search engine loads the .aln file and fetches the dynamic cgi document from the web server. The web server renders the dynamic cgi document and produces html with Alkaline tags and dynamically generated content. Alkaline parses the tags and produces search results.