web-7.0

A shiny replacement for http://freenode.net.

Building

You'll need our node.js dependencies:

$ sudo npm install -g postcss-cli svgo
$ npm install

Then, assuming a Python 3.4 (or later) installation:

$ python3 -m venv env
$ . env/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ cms7

If everything went well, you should see a lot of log output, and out/ will have the website in it.

Because we generate the site statically, you'll need to re-run cms7 each time you change something. If your editor likes compile commands that can run from any directory, you can also use cms7 -c /path/to/config.yml.

Contributing

• Whenever possible, one commit per feature.
• If feature/pull-request branches have only one developer, please regularly rebase them onto master until they are merged in.
• Don't merge branches with meaningless commit messages; always squash them instead.
• Wait for discussion of big changes. Your branches will still be here tomorrow.

Helpful tip for those merging PRs: you can browse the tree a merge would result in by navigating to https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/tree/pull/XYZ/merge, where XYZ is the pull request number.

You can also go to https://freenode.net/web-7.0/BRANCHNAME/ to see a build of any particular branch. This also works for internal pull requests (they are named pull-X).

Architecture / Orientation

The site is generated from Markdown sources and Jinja2 templates, found in content/ and templates/ respectively. The Travis build deploys to GitHub Pages automatically on every push.

Various modules convert the sources to a useful output structure. Eventually cms7 will document this process, but for now:

• content/pages/ contains plain pages which are rendered in out/ using page.html.

• content/news/ contains blog/news posts which are rendered in out/news/ using article.html.

• content/kb/ contains KB categories: each directory content/kb/X/ has the entries for category X. These are rendered in out/kb/answers/ with kb.html.

  Indexes of these entries are rendered in out/kb/ with kb_index.html, according to a list in config/kb.yml.

Markdown metadata

cms7 uses the markdown metadata extension, and recognises some special keys:

• title sets the page title
• slug overrides the target URL: pages/hello with slug: banana would become out/banana.html
• template overrides the template with which to render this Markdown file

Blog-specific:

• author
• date
• enclosure sets the podcast URL of an article

Internal linking

Everything that ends up in the final output has a name that identifies it to the rest of the website. If a file is derived directly from an input file, generally its name is derived from the name of the input.

• Markdown files like content/pages/hello.md are named their own name relative to the content directory, minus their extension: pages/hello.
• static resources like static/img/cat.jpg are named their own name relative to the repository root: static/img/cat.jpg.
• Templates that are rendered from nothing (e.g. to make the index page) are named whatever the config file says to name them.
• KB indexes are named kb/index/X, where X is the name of the index in config/kb.yml.

cms7 can generate a relative URL to anything with a name from any page. This should always be preferred over manually writing links. To generate a relative link from a Markdown document, just link to a name:

[A page about frogs](pages/frog)

To do the same from a template, call url_for:

<a href="{{ url_for('pages/frog') }}">A page about frogs</a>