Mapserver input and mapfile

[Apeksha Bhambhani]

 We are new to Mapserver .Working on a project with RedHat/ 
  As of now the mapserver installation seems perfect . However we are  having problems running the demo. Apart from this we are pretty  confused as to how exactly can we use Mapserver . Our motive is to  display a map on the web n allow the users to edit the map . 
  We were wondering as to what would the input to the mapserver be? 
  Also taking the input as a shapefile , we have not been able to successfully display the layers. 
  We tried this by downloading from a site a shapefile which includes  (.shp,.shx,.dbf) files. We put these files in the data directory (  /var/www/html/data) . We generated a map file and put it in  /var/www/html. Having the shapefile how are we supposed to interpret  the layer data ? We try to access the image through the browser.  However we have been unsuccessful .
  Can somebody plz help us out .
  
  Thanking You ,
  Apeksha
  

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