Website Maintenance

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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{sizing|develdocs}.phtml are currently (2017) hopeless outdated.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 HTML5 with charset=UTF-8.
Todo
  • A few elements like #Metatags contain attributes based on RDFa etc. Some declaration required?

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

Tutorials
https://www.w3schools.com/ has tutorials for HTML, CSS, and PHP.

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.
A nice tool for modern PHP is PHP-CS-Fixer.
  • Multiple occurrences of the same text: Assign it once to a variable and use that.
Comments
While 
<!-- HTML comments -->
are sent to the readers (show source view), 
<?PHP // PHP comment line
?>

<?PHP //*
 and PHP comment block
*/ ?>
are not visible to them.

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)
    • [global] $variable or
    • [define (] CONSTANT […)] and use that in both flavours,
  2. mark it as T_("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");
?>
or as single expression in HTML parts
 <?=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

Moved to Language Administration#Website.

Images

Traditional web icons had a size of 32x32, for today see #Favicon. For other images we have a few tips in Documentation_Update_Instructions#Screenshots_and_Images.

App icons today have a default size of 48x48.
Dependencies
Some images are referenced from elsewhere:
gnucash: gnucash.appdata.xml
<screenshots> section
Wiki_Tips
[[[:Template:WebURL]]/images/gnucash-perspective.png gnucash-perspective.png]
[[[:Template:WebURL]]/images/banner5.png banner5.png]

Testing

Spell Check

Ideally you should spell check your textual changes by priority:

  1. Language: Source files should be in en_US, not en_GB or something else;
  2. Grammar, including punctuation;
  3. Typography (Documentation_Update_Instructions#Text_conventions).
Todo
Add references and/or tools.

make check

After modifying PHP parts, run 
make check
before committing. This currently calls 
php -l <file>
— PHP's integrated lint — for all php or phtml files.

W3C Validation

There are at least 2 ways to validate pages against W3C standards:

Local Test
If PHP and Tidy are installed on your system, you can check your work with HTML Tidy before pushing by e.g.: 
clear; LANGUAGE=C php index.phtml | tidy -config tidy.conf
# or to locate errors easier:
clear; LANGUAGE=C php index.phtml >tmp.html && tidy -config tidy.conf tmp.html
# the location is then valid for tmp.html
## Exception: atom.php produces xml (Fixme: There is no authoritative DTD nor XSD for RFC 4287 so xmllint won't work.):
clear; LANGUAGE=C php atom.php >tmp.xml && xmllint --valid tmp.xml {-o out.xml|--noout}
to test the english version. In theory you should run it for all installed languages as it is possible, that a page is broken only in one language, if the translator made a mistake with the markups in the msgstrings like using uppercase tags in XHTML — or some HTML injection.
Tip for news
Because our *news pages are very long, it is suggested to test your new *.news file separatly before the full news page: 
$ tidy -config tidy.conf news/200726-4.1.news
line 1 column 1 - Warning: missing <!DOCTYPE> declaration
line 1 column 1 - Warning: inserting implicit <body>
line 1 column 1 - Warning: inserting missing 'title' element
Info: Document content looks like HTML5
Tidy found 3 warnings and 0 errors!
This 3 warnings are normal because this elements are part of news.phtml. But fix everything else!
Create an adjusted tidy.conf
Execute 
tidy -export-config > tidy.conf
and then adjust it:
  • Enabling indentation and wrapping improves the readability. show-filename is only useful, if you do no preprocessing by PHP.
  • With Cleanup options you can generate an improved output to be merged back in your files:
clean: replaces legacy presentational tags: <i>, <b>, <center> when enclosed within appropriate inline tags, and <font>.
logical-emphasis: replaces <i> with <em> and <b> with <strong>.
replace-color: replaces numeric values in color attributes with HTML/XHTML color names where defined, e.g. "#ffffff" with "white".
Final Test
After pushing and transfer of your changes to the website check the results with https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gnucash.org%2Fbeta%2Fnews.phtml (vary the last part if you maintained a different page). Fix any errors it reports and re-commit.

The Atom feed can be tested with The W3C Validator.

Mobile Friendliness

Today there are more mobiles than desktop devices.

Metatags

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

Favicon

Because there are in between many flavours of favicons (resolutions, devices, OSes, browsers) you can use a service like

Favicon Generator. For real.

to check and update them.

Size
As of 2020-10-05 they recommend 260x260 or more for optimal results and require at least 70x70.
Type
As they accept many formats, we recommend PNG.

On Your Localhost

Todo
Idea
Set up a web server, usually apache.
Tip
Eclipses PHP module can also run a test instance.
Add your repository to your apache configuration /etc/apache2/conf.d/
View http://localhost/gnucash/

Future developement

Gettext variants

We are currently using

  • PHP-gettext, Copyright (c) 2009 Danilo Segan <danilo@kvota.net>
Last available version: https://launchpad.net/php-gettext/trunk/1.0.11 released: 2010-12-24

And there are:

User:Fell is not sure, how they relate and to which we should upgrade.

CMS or site generator

There are considerations to modernize the website:

Sources
https://lists.gnucash.org/logs/2020/09/27.html#T15:36:13
https://lists.gnucash.org/logs/2020/09/29.html#T10:38:28
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