<p>The website is now large and complicated with a lot of (too many!) moving parts. This handbook section contains info at various levels: simple 'Howto add stuff' information for the typical expoer, more detailed info for cloning it onto your own machine for more significant edits, and structural info on how it's all put together for people who want/need to change things.</p>
<p>You can update the site via the troggle pages, by editing pages online via a browser, by editing them locally on disk, or by checking out the relevant part to your computer and editing it there. Which is best depends on your knowledge and what you want to do. For simple addition of cave or survey data troggle is recommended. For other edits it's best if you can edit the files directly rather than using the 'edit this page' button, but that means you either need to be on expo with the expo computer, or be able to check out a local copy. If neither of these apply then using the 'edit this page' button is fine.</p>
<p>It's important to understand that everything on the site is stored in a distributed version control system (DVCS) (called 'mercurial'), which means that every edited file needs to be 'checked in' at some point. The Expo website manual goes into more detail about this, below. This stops us losing data and makes it very hard for you to screw anything up permanently, so don't worry about making changes - they can always be reverted if there is a problem. It also means that several people can work on the site on different computers at once and normally merge their changes easily.</p>
<p>Increasing amounts of the site are autogenerated, not just files, so you have to edit the base data, not the generated file. All autogenerated files say 'This file is autogenerated - do not edit' at the top - so check for that before wasting time on changes that will just be overwritten</p>
<p>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. There are lots of things we could improve about the system, and anyone with some computer nous is very welcome to muck in. It is slowly getting better organised.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h3>Contents</h3>
<ol>
<li><ahref="#usernamepassword">Getting a username and password</a></li>
<b>This password is important for security</b>. The whole site <strong>will</strong> get hacked by spammers or worse if you are not careful with it. Use a secure method for passing it on to others that need to know (i.e not unencrypted email), don't publish it anywhere, don't check it in to the website by accident. A lot of people use it and changing it is a pain for everyone so do take a bit of care.
expo.survex.com. This is currently hosted on a server at the university. Mercurial* is a distributed version control system which allows collaborative editing and keeps track of all changes so we can roll back and have branches if needed.</p>
<h3><aid="howitworks">How the website works</a></h3>
<p>Part of the website is static HTML, but quite a lot is generated by scripts. So anything you check in which affects cave data or descriptions won't appear on the site until the website update scripts are run. This happens automatically every 30 mins, but you can also kick off a manual update. See 'The expoweb-update script' below for details.</p>
<p>Also note that the website you see is its own mercurial checkout (just like your local one) so that has to be 'pulled' from the server before your changes are reflected.</p>
<h3><aid="quickstart">Quick start</a></h3>
<p>If you know what you are doing here is the basic info on what's where:</p>
<p>(do be careful not to delete piles of stuff then rsync back - as it'll all get deleted on the server too, and we may not have backups!). Use rsync --dry-run --delete-after -a to check what would be deleted.</p>
<p>To edit the website fully, you need a mercurial client. Some (static text) pages can be edited directly on-line using the 'edit this page link' which you'll see if you are logged into troggle. In general dynamically-generated pages can not be edited in this way, but forms are provided for some page-types like 'caves'.</p>
<p>Linux: Install mercurial and tortoisehg-nautilus from synaptic,
then restart nautilus <tt>nautilus -q</tt>. If it works, you'll be able to see the menus of Tortoise within your Nautilus windows. </p>
<p>Once you've downloaded and installed a client, the first step is to create what is called a checkout of the website. This creates a copy on your machine which you can edit to your heart's content. The command to initially check out ('clone') the entire expo website is:</p>
<p>or right clicking on the folder and going to commit in TortoiseHG. Mercurial can't always work out who you are. If you see a message like "abort: no username supplied" it was probably not set up to deduce that from your environment. It's easiest to give it the info in a config file at ~/.hgrc (create it if it doesn't exist, or add these lines if it already does) containing something like</p>
<p>Before pushing, you should do an <tt>hg pull</tt> to sync with upstream first. If someone else has edited the same files you may also need to do:</p>
<p>Simple changes to static files will take effect immediately, but changes to dynamically-generated files (cave descriptions, QM lists etc) will not take effect, until the server runs the expoweb-update script.</p>
<h3><aid="mercurialinwindows">Using Mercurial/TortoiseHg in Windows</a></h3>
<p>In Windows: install Mercurial and TortoiseHg of the relevant flavour from http://mercurial.selenic.com/downloads/ (ignoring antivirus/Windows warnings).</p>
<p>To start cloning a repository: start TortoiseHg Workbench, click File -> Clone repository, a dialogue box will appear. In the Source box type</p>
<p>or similar for the other repositories. In the Destination box type whatever destination you want your local copies to live in. Hit Clone, and it should hopefully prompt you for the usual beery password.
<p>The first time you do this it will probably not work as it does not recognise the server. Fix this by running putty, and connecting to the server 'expo@expo.survex.com' (on port 22). Confirm that this is the right server. If you succeed in getting a shell prompt then ssh connection are working and tortoisehg should be able to clone the repo, and send changes back.</p>
<p>The script at the heart of the website update mechanism is a makefile that runs the various generation scripts. It is run every 15 minutes as a cron job (at 0,15,30 and 45 past the hour), but if you want to force an update more quickly you can run it he</p>
<p>The scripts are generally under the 'noinfo' section of the site just because that has (had) some access control. This will get changed to something more sensible at some point</p>
<p>Logbooks are typed up and put under the years/nnnn/ directory as 'logbook.html'.</p>
<p>Do whatever you like to try and represent the logbook in html. The only rigid structure is the markup to allow troggle to parse the files into 'trips':</p>
<p>Older logbooks (prior to 2007) were stored as logbook.txt with just a bit of consistent markup to allow troggle parsing.</p>
<p>The formatting was largely freeform, with a bit of markup ('===' around header, bars separating date, <place> - <description>, and who) which allows the troggle import script to read it correctly. The underlines show who wrote the entry. There is also a format for time-underground info so it can be automagically tabulated.</p>
<p>This is generated by the script tablizebyname-csv.pl from the input file Surveys.csv</p>
<h3><aid="history">History</a></h3>
<p>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 short 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.</p>
<p>Martin Green added the SURVTAB.CSV file to contain tabulated data for many caves around 1999, and a script to generate the index pages from it. Dave Loeffler added scripts and programs to generate the prospecting maps in 2004. The server moved to Mark Shinwell's machine in the early 2000s, and the VCS was updated to subversion.</p>
<p>In 2006 Aaron Curtis decided that a more modern set of generated, database-based pages made sense, and so wrote Troggle. This uses Django to generate pages. This reads in all the logbooks and surveys and provides a nice way to access them, and enter new data. It was separate for a while until Martin Green added code to merge the old static pages and new troggle dynamic pages into the same site. Work on Troggle still continues sporadically.</p>
<p>After expo 2009 the VCS was updated to hg, because a DVCS makes a great deal of sense for expo (where it goes offline for a month or two and nearly all the year's edits happen).</p>
<p>The site was moved to Julian Todd's seagrass server (in 2010), but the change from a 32-bit to 64-bit machine broke the website autogeneration code,
</br>/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
<p>Mercurial is a distributed revision control system. On expo this means that many people can edit and merge their changes with each other either when they can access the internet. Mercurial is inefficient for scanned survey notes, which are large files that do not get modified, so they are kept as a plain directory of files.</p>
<p>This is likely to change with structural change to the site, with style changes which we expect to implement and with the method by which the info is actually stored and served up.</p>
<li>Contents lists & relative links for multi-article publications like journals. Complicated by expo articles being in a separate hierarchy from journals.</li>
<li>Other people's work - the noinfo hierarchy.</li>
<li>Style guide for writing cave descriptions: correct use of boldface (<em>once</em> for each passage name, at the primary definition thereof; other uses of the name should be links to this, and certainly should not be bold.) </li>
