Difference between revisions of "Expo website manual"

Latest revision as of 20:05, 22 June 2013

This page has now moved

It's now part of the expo handbook. Please link/update that page henceforth.

A few remnants have been left here until they are properly merged.

To edit the website, you need a mercurial client. If you are using Windows, TortoiseHg is highly recommended. Lots of tools for Linux and mac exist too [1], both GUI and command-line:

Using Mercurial/TortoiseHg in Windows

In Windows: install Mercurial and TortoiseHg of the relevant flavour from http://mercurial.selenic.com/downloads/ (ignoring antivirus/Windows warnings).

Automation on cucc.survex.com/expo

The way things normally work, python or perl scripts turn CSV input into HTML for the website. Note that:

The CSV files are actually tab-separated, not comma-separated despite the extension.
The scripts can be very picky and editing the CSVs with microsoft excel has broken them in the past- not sure if this is still the case.

Overview of the automagical scripts on the expo website
Script location	Input file	Output file	Purpose
/svn/trunk/expoweb/noinfo/make-indxal4.pl	/svn/trunk/expoweb/noinfo/CAVETAB2.CSV	many	produces all cave description pages
/svn/trunk/expoweb/noinfo/make-folklist.py	/svn/trunk/expoweb/noinfo/folk.csv	http://cucc.survex.com/expo/folk/index.htm	Table of all expo members
/svn/trunk/surveys/tablize-csv.pl /svn/trunk/surveys/tablizebyname-csv.pl	/svn/trunk/surveys/Surveys.csv	http://cucc.survex.com/expo/surveys/surveytable.html http://cucc.survex.com/expo/surveys/surtabnam.html	Survey status page: "wall of shame" to keep track of who still needs to draw which surveys
			Prospecting guide

Website mysteries

The following are questions for people who know the expo website well, which stumped Aaron.

Why is there a /home/cucc/www/expo/surveys as well as a /home/cucc/www/surveys , and is there any difference?

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-Editing the expo website is an adventure. Until now, there was no guide which explains the whole thing as a functioning system. Learning it by trial and error is non-trivial.
+==This page has now moved==
-The website needs improvement, perhaps a complete overhaul. However, it is impossible to go about fixing it properly until we know how the whole thing works.
+It's now part of the [http://expo.survex.com/handbook/update.htm expo handbook]. Please link/update that page henceforth.
-This manual is organized in a how-to sort of style. The categories, rather than referring to specific elements of the website, refer to processes that a maintainer would want to do.
+A few remnants have been left here until they are properly merged.
-==How to update things on expo.survex.com==
+-----------
-===Getting a username and password===
+To edit the website, you need a mercurial client. If you are using Windows, [http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/ TortoiseHg] is highly recommended. Lots of tools for Linux and mac exist too [http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/OtherTools ], both GUI and command-line:
-User user 'expo', password 'gosser' for access to the site.
-===Version control===
+===Using Mercurial/TortoiseHg in Windows===
-No changes should be made directly to any files on the server. Instead, we use a version control system to allow collaborative editing and so that any changes can be rolled back if necessary. That system is mercurial (the command is 'hg'), which is a distributed VCS.
-To edit the website, you need a mercurial client. If you are using windows, [http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/|TortoiseSVN] is highly recommended. Once you've downloaded and installed it, the first step is to create what is called a checkout of the website or section of the website which you want to work on. This creates a copy on your machine which you can edit to your heart's content. The command to check out the entire expo website is
+In Windows: install Mercurial and TortoiseHg of the relevant flavour from http://mercurial.selenic.com/downloads/  (ignoring antivirus/Windows warnings).
- svn co svn+ssh://cucc.survex.com/home/cucc/svn/trunk/expoweb
-In TortoiseSVN, merely right-click on a folder you want to check out to, choose "SVN checkout," and enter
- svn+ssh://cucc.survex.com/home/cucc/svn/trunk/expoweb
-After you've made your changes, check them back in using
- svn ci
-or right clicking on the folder and going to check in in TortoiseSVN.
-None of your changes will take effect, however, until you've run the expoweb-update script.
-===The expoweb-update script===
-The script at the heart of the website update mechanism is a shell script at
-  /cucc.survex.com/home/cucc/bin/expoweb-update
-To run scripts on the server, you need to log in via SSH. The best way to do this in windows is to download [http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ PuTTY].
-===Updating cave pages===
-Cave description pages are automatically generated from a comma separated values (CSV) table named CAVETAB2.CSV by a perl script called make-indxal4.pl . make-indxal4.pl is called automatically.
-The first step is to check out, edit, and check in CAVETAB2.CSV, which is at
-  /home/cucc/www/expo/noinfo/CAVETAB2.CSV
-You need to be somewhat careful with the formatting; each cell needs to be only one line long (i.e. no newlines) or the script will get confused.
-And then run expoweb-update as above.
-===Updating expo year pages===
-Each year's expo has a documentation index which is in the folder
- /home/cucc/www/expo/years
-, so to checkout the 2007 page, for example, you would use
- svn co svn+ssh://cucc.survex.com/home/cucc/svn/trunk/expoweb/years/2007
-===Adding typed logbooks===
-To be written.
-===Ticking off QMs===
-To be written.
-===Maintaining the survey status table===
-At [http://cucc.survex.com/expo/surveys/surtabnam.html] there is a table which has a list of all the surveys and whether or not they have been drawn up, and some other info.
-This is generated by the script /home/cucc/www/tablizebyname-csv.pl from the input file /home/cucc/www/Surveys.csv
-===History===
-The CUCC Website was originally created by Andy Waddington in the early 1990s and was hosted by Wookey. The VCS was CVS. The whole site was just static HTML, carefully designed to be RISCOS-compatible (hence the 10-character filenames) as both Wadders and Wookey were RISCOS people then. Wadders wrote a huge amount of info collecting expo history, photos, cave data etc.
-Martin Green added the SURVTAB.CSV file to contain tabulated data for many caves, and a script to generate the index pages from it. Dave Loeffler added scripts and programs to generate the prospecting maps. The server moved to Mark Shinwell's machine in the early 2000s, and the VCS was updated to subversion.
-After expo 2009 the VCS was updated to hg, because a DVCS makes a great deal of sense for expo.
-The site was moved to Julian Todd's seagrass server, but the change from 32-bit to 64-bit machines broke the website autogeneration code, which was only fixed in early 2011, allowing the move to complete. The data has been split into 3 separate repositories: the website, the survey data, the tunnel data.
 ==Automation on cucc.survex.com/expo==

Difference between revisions of "Expo website manual"

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Latest revision as of 20:05, 22 June 2013

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