Website Maintenance

Sometimes something should be improved on our website. This page is intended to collect the right procedure.

Introduction

www.gnucash.org is the webserver of the GnuCash project. The sources are public available at GitHub. Building is done by a simple GNU Make.

Branches

Master: https://www.gnucash.org, the official site,

Beta: https://www.gnucash.org/beta/ is intended for developing major changes.

Content State

{sizing|develdocs}.phtml are currently (2017) hopeless outdated.

Used Standards

• The static structure is usually written in HTML.

Html version & encoding

The main page is based on XHTML+RDFa with charset=UTF-8.

Todo

• older parts are still HTML 4.01 and have charset=iso-8859-1.
• A few, currently disabled, Social Media snippets would expect HTML 5.

• The dynamic parts are injectet via PHP. You can assume PHP7 is supported.
• Direct formating is disliked. Instead we use the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) from externals/gnucash.css.

Adding or Changing Text

If you add or change text, keep in mind Gnucash and its website are multilingual. If you - like me and most other people - are not firm in all languages, you should ask the translators, to help you keeping the translations up to date.

"Coding" Style

The current code is suboptimal. In the future follow standards:

HTML

(https://selfhtml.org/ is a good starting point in German)

PHP

The PHP Framework Interop Group published them. PSR-0 got obsoleted by PSR-4, so start with PSR-1: Basic Coding Standard.

• Multiple occurrences of the same text: Assign it once to a variable and use that.

Metatags

Currently 2 sets of metatags are important/partly implemented:

1. By Google recognized <meta> tags
2. The Open Graph protocol is primary used by Facebook and requires at least the W3C standard Resource Description Framework in Attributes (RDFa).

Rules

If applicable,

1. put content in a (PHP) $variable or $CONSTANT and use that in both flavours,
2. mark it as _("Translatable").

Restrictions

Title

60 char,

Description

105 char, first words are today taken as keywords by Google,

Image

[TBD: currently slightly too big or because some of

type, width, length, alt

are missing]

Keyword

Negative impact today as they often were misused.

I18N

• Translatable text is quoted:

 <?php echo T_("A translatable string");?>

• Separate data (Numbers, URL, ...) from text:

Bad

 <?php echo T_("<span class=\"gnucash\">GnuCash</span> handles internationalized dates and currencies. The application's menus and popups have been translated to 21 languages, including Chinese, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and British English. Documentation is available in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.");?></p>

Better

 <?php printf (T_("<span class=\"gnucash\">GnuCash</span> handles internationalized dates and currencies. The application's menus and popups have been translated to %u languages, including Chinese, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and British English. Documentation is available in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish."), 21);?></p>

Now an additional translation of the program will not break all website translations.

• Try to avoid putting URLs in translatable strings, but

• links to the wiki should be separate marked translatatable - there might be a translated page in the wiki.
• addresses of images, which contain text should be translatable to link them to localized versions.

• Todo: Try also to avoid Markups in the translatable text.

Fix me

Which methods should we use for the images? This needs documentation in Translation, too.

Managing Translations

After changing the english text, you should prepare the translation by

1. creating a new .pot file

   make pot

2. msgmerge all existing .po files

   make msgmerge

   and commit the updates

3. send a short mail to gnucash-devel about "Translators: Website changed ..."

   feel free to give them some clues, what changed like

   "complete new download page" or

   "fixed 42 typos in the english text".

4. As patches with reworked .po files arrive,
   1. If a language is new, add it in

      makefile

      to languages

   2. If a language is new or bitrotten, add or enable in

      externals/header.phtml

      a line in

      <span id="language">
      

      Note

      A few languages are disabled here, because they are bitrotten.

   3. apply them and
   4. make the .mo files, e.g. with

      make mos

   5. commit

      [[makefile, ]

      externals/header.phtml, ]

      po/LL.po and

      locale/LL/LC_MESSAGES/gnucash-htdocs.mo

      where LL is the language code.

Further details can be found on the Translation page.

Testing

W3C

After pushing your commit press the W3C-Check button in the lower left corner of the website and fix any claimed errors.

Do it for every page, which might by affected by your change. E.g. Changing a modules in /external might affect all pages.

Mobile Friendliness

Today there are more mobiles than desktop devices.

• Google test mobile-friendly

Metatags

If you changed Metattags and related elements like images, enter the URL at https://metatags.io/ to see how the page would appear in several social media.

On Your Localhost=

Todo

Idea

Set up apache (or another webserver?)

Add your repository to your apache configuration /etc/apache2/conf.d/

View http://localhost/gnucash/