Making updates to the Apache OpenOffice project's websites is simple. It's even easy for non-committers (new contributors - like you) to create a patch to request that pages are updated by the project community.

Two Websites

The Apache OpenOffice project maintains two websites:

The following instructions are obsolete! Both websites have been migrated away from the deprecated Apache CMS!

Both of these sites use the Apache Content Management System (CMS) to manage editing, submitting changes, and updating the live websites. In essence, regardless of how you make changes to either web area, the changes first go the staging sites for these areas, respectively (below), and then are copied to the production websites.

Version Control

We use Apache Subversion for version control. You can browse the project repository or browse the user portal repository source files directly in your web browser.

How To Make or Request Changes to the Websites

Using SVN Directly (for technical users)

You can make changes to either site using svn (subversion). This typically involves doing an svn checkout, making changes to files and --

Consult your local svn implementation for how to do commits or create patches. (See also, the SVN Book ).

Patches, svn "diff" files can be submitted in a variety of ways:

Changes committed with SVN commit your changes to the "staging area". These changes will need to be published to become active on the "production" site.

Using the Apache CMS Bookmarklet (simpler method)

Quick editing of the site is available for committers and contributors using the Apache CMS from your browser. If you are a committer and use the bookmarklet in your web browser, you should use your Apache credentials to log in, make changes and submit them to staging. If you are not a committer, you can still use the bookmarklet by signing in to the bookmarklet as anonymous. See detailed how-to steps in the Apache CMS Reference for non-committers.

More Details

Additional details on the above methods can be found on How to edit the Apache OpenOffice website.

Publishing Changes to the Production Websites

For Committers

As previously noted, changes you make, either through an svn commit or using the CMS GUI tool, are enacted on the staging sites. Once you review your changes on the staging site, you can "publish" the site -- enacting your changes on the production site. Only Apache "committers" can actually publish sites.

Generally speaking, unless you have established a full Complete Local Website Development environment as described in the next section, you will likely be running publish.pl from your "people.apache.org" account.

For Contributors -- non-committers

If you are not a committer, you will need to follow the procedures for "contributors" in the Developer FAQ for getting your changes published by a committer of the project, after you submit a patch.

Complete Local Website Development (for technical users and committers)

The following information provides instructions on doing website development for either of the OpenOffice websites on your local computer. If you feel a need to change anything on the websites that effect site processing by the CMS -- e.g. the templates, processing for new file types not included in /lib/path.pm, additional Django template capabilities, etc. -- you will need to setup a local website development area for testing changes.

These instructions assume you have setup a webserver in your local environment. Details are provided on setting up the resources needed to process "Markdown" on your local server and how to publish to the production Apache OpenOffice sites from your local environment.

Setup

Create a directory on your computer for the Apache CMS work with both the project's

site and the migrating openoffice.org website.

mkdir aoo-web
cd aoo-web

Download the svn repos for the AOO project site.

svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/openoffice/site/trunk site

Download the svn repos for the migrated OpenOffice.org website.

svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/openoffice/ooo-site/trunk ooo-site

Download the svn repos for the Apache CMS.

svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/infra/websites/cms/ cms

You will have three sub-directories in your local website directory -- site, ooo-site, and cms. The "cms" directory will contain scripts needed to build either of the websites using the ASF CMS in a local environment. This is necessary to see how changes to templates or other ASF CMS internal files will affect the website. See: https://www.apache.org/dev/cms.html for more information on the ASF CMS directory structure.

Install Python dependencies.

Adapted from the Apache CMS Reference

The easiest way to install the dependencies is to use Python setuptools.

Check that your version of Python is 2.7 or greater

python --version

Follow the installation instructions for setuptools.

Install dependencies

sudo easy_install Pygments
sudo easy_install ElementTree
sudo easy_install Markdown

Directory Layout

Content directories

The site/content/openofficeorg and ooo-site/content/ directories contain web content - markdown, html, javascript, css, images and other files. Files that do not fit recognized patterns from site/lib/path.pm or ooo-site/lib/path.pm are copied as is to the web site during the build.

Templates directory

The site/templates and ooo-site/templates directories contain the html skeletons used during the site build.

You may see other template files here as well that are used by Django during the site construction.

Lib directory

The site/lib and ooo-site/lib directories contain two perl modules that determine how content files are processed during the site build.

Build tools

You can find the CMS build tools in the cms directory.

These can be extended locally. Before any changes become part of our process they will need to be cleared with Apache Infrastructure. We'll need to submit patches. These should be additive or be bug fixes.

This area should be updated, via svn update, as changes do take place on these routines.

Local Development

Edit the site

Using your favorite editors edit the site content, templates, and lib scripts.

Python Markdown Daemon

Start the Python Markdown daemon.

export MARKDOWN_SOCKET=`pwd`/markdown.socket PYTHONPATH=`pwd`
python cms/build/markdownd.py

Build the sites.

Using the directory names from Download sections above --

cms/build/build_site.pl --source-base site --target-base www
cms/build/build_site.pl --source-base ooo-site --target-base www

This will generate the web content for the project site, "site", or the openoffice site, "ooo-site" to directory "www".

Copy the site to an area your computer's web server.

On my Mac:

sudo scp -rp www/content /Library/WebServer/Documents/.

The site is then available with http://localhost/openofficeorg/ or http://localhost/

Submitting your results.

Committer

Do the appropriate combination of svn status, svn add, and svn commits. Commits will cause staging rebuilds. See How to Edit the Apache OpenOffice Website

Please note that if you have removed any files or directories from your source tree then you must also remove these from the staging build. The staging for the project site is https://svn.apache.org/repos/infra/websites/staging/openofficeorg. Check the staging builf out, svn remove and commit the same files and directories.

Contributor

Use SVN to submit svn "diffs".

For further information see the Apache Source Code Repository page.