The website is now large and complicated with a lot (too many!) of 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.
+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.
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.
-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.
+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.
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
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
+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.
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.
@@ -55,7 +55,11 @@Use these credentials for access to the site. The user is 'expo', -with a cavey:beery password. Ask someone if this isn't enough clue for you.
+ with a cavey:beery password. Ask someone if this isn't enough clue for you. + This password is important for security. The whole site will + +Note that you don't need a password to view most things, but you will need ne to change them
Photos, scans (logbooks, drawn-up cave segments) (This is about