Re: editing the website

[Geir Magnusson Jr <ge...@pobox.com>]

Tim Ellison wrote:
> Geir Magnusson Jr wrote:
> 
>>Please stop with the personal pages - put on the main website.  It's
>>trivial to use.
> 
> 
> Sure - its only there temporarily because I'm ignorant of how to update
> the website.

Sure - I didn't meant that to sound harsh.  Just digging out.

> 
> Is there a handy guide to using Anakia? 

Maybe.  I'll look.  it's dumb-simple.

> I got as far as downloading
> Velocity, compiling it and running the tests successfully, all using the
> Harmony class library code of course ;-)

That's excellent, and quite amazing actually.

Of course, there's no need because I keep all the jars needed to build 
in SVN in the site tree.  The only thing you need to have installed is 
ant and java.

The upshot to Anakia is that documents are in xml in the xdocs/ 
directory, and there's a render step to generate the full site.

The XML format is very simple.  There's no DTD and thus no validation 
step, but anakia will throw a conniption anyway.  I've used xdoc 
internal to commercial organization, and did to a DTD, but it turns out 
that I didn't see any benefit.

Navigation is done via xdocs/stylesheet/project.xml  I believe that it's 
so obvious and simple, that it doesn't need any basic introduction.  If 
there are detailed questions, just ask.

That's all you need to know for 98% of all things on the site.  The 
other 2% are related to the actual render and style, and that's 
controlled by xdocs/stylesheets/site.vsl  This is a procedural approach 
to rendering using macros, and IMO fairly yecchy.  I wrote a tool called 
"DVSL" to replace Anakia, which does it in a declarative XSL-style, and 
I prefer that, but given that no one ever touches the stylesheet, anakia 
is just fine.

What else...

Some people protest that there's no need to put the rendered html in 
SVN, because we can just do it on the server.  I disagree, because we 
know that with this method, we know that what is going to the site has 
been reviewed, hopefully actively by the author, and certainly passively 
by the rest of the community via the commit mail stream.

anyway, it also means that at any time, any user can get the site 
content locally w/o having to build it (very useful when our docs are in 
there) and further, we can version along with the code if that was 
appropos...

geir


> 
> Regards,
> Tim
>