Difference between revisions of "Expo website manual"

Revision as of 09:09, 2 June 2008

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.

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.

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.

How to update things on cucc.survex.com/expo

Getting a username and password

Contact Mark Shinwell.

Version control

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. In the past this was CVS (Concurrent Version System), and there was guide to using that system. Now we use SVN (Subversion).

To edit the website, you need an SVN client. If you are using windows, [1] 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

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 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 [2] 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

Automation on cucc.survex.com/expo

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?