Website

Checking out the website

The website is managed in a git repository.

Anyone can checkout the website using git-clone:

git-clone caffeine:/users/www/www/.git

This creates a directory called 'www' that contains the entire website and repository. If you want to make changes to the website, you'll need to ask someone on the Systems Committee to add you to the 'www' group and to the 'git' mailing list. The easiest way to see your changes without committing them is to create a symlink into your public 'www' directory. For example, say your local copy of the website lives in '/users/dtbartle/csc/www'. You could symlink '/users/dtbartle/csc/www' to '/users/dtbartle/www/csc':

ln -s /users/dtbartle/csc/www /users/dtbartle/www/csc

Then you could see your copy of the website at this URL:

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~dtbartle/csc/

Committing changes to the website

If you add a new file to the website, you can add it to git:

git-add file

To delete a file type:

git-rm file

And to rename or move a file type:

git-mv old-file new-file

Once you're done modifying the website you can commit your changes:

git-commit -a

The above command only commits the change to your local repository; you need to push the changes out to the master repository:

git-push

The above command will also automatically rebuild the website and send out an email to the git mailing list with the details of your change.

Building the website

Once you've checked out the website, you can build the website by running:

make

You can remove the generated files by running:

make clean

Modifying the website

XML

The website's data is contained in a series of XML files. A series of XSLT files are used to transform the XML data into HTML files. If you want to add new information to the website you'll want to modify the XML files.

Some notable XML files:

• events.xml - past and upcoming events
• news.xml - past and upcoming items
• media/index.xml - media items (e.g. talks)
• about/exec.xml - the current club exec

XML should be fairly easy to work with. Some important things to remember:

• All opening tags must be closed.
• All tags should generally be in lowercase.
• Tag and attribute names and case-sensitive.

If you want more information on XML, the following are good resources:

• The XML specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml-20060816/
• XML tutorials and general reference: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp

XSLT

If you want to change the HTML layout you'll want to modify 'default.css'. or the XSLT files. Almost all XSLT files are located in the 'xsl' directory. We are using XSLT 2.0, which is generally backwards compatible with XSLT 1.0.

Website vs Wiki

My position (as webmaster) on what should be in the website and what should be in the wiki is as follows:

Website:

• Information not likely to change frequently (e.g. services)
• Information that should only be modifiable by the exec
• Anything official
  • constitution
  • policies
  • member lists
  • club lists
• News, events, and media items

Wiki:

• Information that changes frequently, or is related to internal club workings
• Information that any club member should be able to add to or modify
• Information on creating talks and posting them
• Past funding opportunities and advice
• Contacts (e.g. CSCF, SCS)