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 (dtbartle, 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
- Official documents (e.g. constitution, policies)
- User and club lists
- News, events, and media items
- Anything we want non-members to see when they first encounter our site
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)
As per the above, I will be moving the following pages to the wiki:
As per above, I may possibly remove or reorganize the following pages:
Also note that we can protect various pages if they shouldn't be edited in general.