Website Maintenance

From Niki

How to maintain nedit.org

(This section is about maintinaing the official website at www.nedit.org, not this wiki).

The website is almost completely maintained in CVS on SourceForge. There basically are two ways in which you can check it out:

• anonymously, which should be sufficient for setting up mirrors, although you might experience some lag before updates become visible. If you want to run a mirror, there's more information on the NEdit Mirror page.

• non-anonymously, in which case you need write access for CVS. You need this to be able to update the website. If you don't have CVS write access but you would like to see something updated on the website, send mail to the developers list.

To check out the website source, proceed as you would with checking out the NEdit source code, but in stead of 'nedit', use project name 'web'.

Updating content

The site has been designed with the intention that non-HTML-gurus should be able to update the content without having to wade through loads of cryptic HTML. For that we use Server Side Includes (SSI), which makes it possible to put (almost) all of the skin in separate files that normally do not need to be updated. In short, feel free to update any page, it isn't hard. If you're not familiar with them, just don't touch the SSIs (bits between <!--# and -->). When in doubt, check with the other developers.

There are some parts of the site that you should be careful about:

• head.shtml and tail.shtml contain the HTML for the site layout. Don't touch these unless you really know what you're doing.

• faq/*.shtml are generated from the FAQ XML source. Modify the XML directly, and regenerate the HTML.

• help/*.shtml are generated from help.etx in the NEdit source. If the help source is updated, these pages should be regenerated. See the little README in this directory. Note that these pages should always contain the help texts for the latest stable release.

• rss/*.shtml are generated from news.xml in the same directory, and should not be edited directly. These files should also not be checked into CVS. See the section on adding news below for more information.

• admin/* are some scripts that are used to handle the RSS feeds. You should know what you're doing if you change anything here.

Adding news

If you want to add a news item, you only need to update news.xml in the rss subdirectory. The easiest way is to copy a previous complete news item (from <item> to </item>), and change the content of the fields. Hints:

• add news items in chronological order, newest at the top

• don't change the content of the <link> element

• use 'date -uR' to generate the timestamp, making it UTC time in RFC-822 compliant form, which should also take care of the locale.

• be sure to HTML encode all material inside the <description> element, including all HTML tags

Check news.xml back in after editing, and you're done. The site will parse the file periodically.