The expo website is confusing. 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.
Contents
Updating anything on the expo website
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 .
The expoweb-update script
The script at the heart of the website is
All changes are made through a combination of the version control system (currently SVN),