[Tor www-team] [Back-end][CMS]

Rey Dhuny rey at spcshp.com
Fri Jan 10 15:56:39 UTC 2014 

Rick Lubbers:

> Why not just write a really simple PHP back-end with TinyMCE that produces plain HTML pages?

Jekyll (or Pelican, Middleman or $static-site-generator) are tools that do one thing and one thing well: they take markdown (or $text files) + templates and spit out a fully static website.

It's important to consider that it's not simply a case of spitting out plain HTML pages as thought has to be given to managing torproject.org's content structure both for launch and as the website's content grows it has to scale.

> Should be quite simple to implement, and with TinyMCE pretty much every moron can work with the back-end.  

I believe writing a bespoke solution for torproject.org 3.0 introduces further complexity as opposed to using one of the proposed static site generators[1]. The proposed have mature codebases, active communities and fulfil the current technical requirements[2].

> Jekyll seems okay too, but still, markup language still is a kind of programming, and lots of content writers are allergic for programming.

Markdown is a) very easy to read and b) very easy to write[3]. I must respectfully disagree that "markup language is still a kind of programming" as in my opinion it's simply a way to structure a text document and nothing more. It's not a skip and a jump away from how one may write an email, for example.

Rey

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/Website#Candidates
[2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/Website#Technicalrequirements
[3] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics


On Friday, 10 January 2014 at 15:18, Rick Lubbers wrote:

> Why not just write a really simple PHP back-end with TinyMCE that produces plain HTML pages? Should be quite simple to implement, and with TinyMCE pretty much every moron can work with the back-end.  
>  
> Jekyll seems okay too, but still, markup language still is a kind of programming, and lots of content writers are allergic for programming.
>  
>  
>  
> 2014/1/10 Sean Rafferty <seanmrafferty at me.com (mailto:seanmrafferty at me.com)>
> > I am currently working on a drupal project and agree that drupal is far too big and complex for the requirements laid out for tor.  Something like jekyll seems much leaner and simpler.
> >  
> > As a developer, I agree that writing straight html would be nice.  But there are a lot of content writers in the world that just don’t know it well enough.  
> >  
> > On Jan 10, 2014, at 7:27 AM, Silviu Riley <silviu.riley at gmail.com (mailto:silviu.riley at gmail.com)> wrote:  
> > > I like the idea if Jekyll, though I've never used it myself. Running a git repo and gerrit will make our use of Jekyll easier.  
> > > We'd use git to manage the markdown files that generate the website and gerrit to approve changes.  
> > > Gerrit is in use by some Android projects. Check it out http://review.cyanogenmod.org (http://review.cyanogenmod.org/) and https://gerrit.omnirom.org (https://gerrit.omnirom.org/)
> > > Silviu.  
> > > On Jan 10, 2014 5:59 AM, "Rey Dhuny" <rey at spcshp.com (mailto:rey at spcshp.com)> wrote:
> > > > > Can anyone explain a bit how Jekyll would work in the context of the Tor website?
> > > >  
> > > > In terms of the Tor website it would be a case of completely replacing the current Drupal implementation with a website built on Jekyll.  
> > > >  
> > > > In practice this would require moving all the content current found on torproject.org (http://torproject.org/) into markdown files.
> > > >  
> > > > Each markdown file would have a `layout`[1] defined in the YAML frontmatter[2] which exists on the top of the markdown file.  
> > > >  
> > > > As a simplified example, a blog post's frontmatter may look like:
> > > >  
> > > > ```
> > > > ---
> > > > layout: post title: "Tor Weekly News" tags: - weeklynews - browserbundle
> > > > ---
> > > > ```
> > > > And a page's frontmatter may look like:
> > > > ```
> > > > ---
> > > > layout: page title: "Documentation" ---
> > > > ```
> > > > The documentation has an example of a basic directory structure: http://jekyllrb.com/docs/structure/
> > > >  
> > > >  
> > > > > Do users need to create the content on disk or through a web interface?
> > > > There is currently no implementation of a `web interface` in Jekyll (although you could argue that GitHub's web edit interface fills this need, that's not relevant to this implementation).
> > > > To create content users would create on disk. How a user gets this created content to torproject.org (http://torproject.org/) is an important consideration. Would they commit this to a git repo? Would they upload to trac? Etc.
> > > > Rey
> > > > [1] http://jekyllrb.com/docs/structure/
> > > > [2] http://jekyllrb.com/docs/frontmatter/
> > > >  
> > > >  
> > > > On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 22:08, Olssy wrote:
> > > >  
> > > > > Starting this thread to discuss the different solutions, what they offer and how many people have used them before.
> > > > >  
> > > > > I know Drupal better than other CMSs and it fits the requirements although static generation is not out of the box but supported by a module(like most things in Drupal). Content is usually created and modified through a web interface that offers either source code view or a WYSIWYG GUI but can be template based using text files on disk.  
> > > > >  
> > > > > Can anyone explain a bit how Jekyll would work in the context of the Tor website? Do users need to create the content on disk or through a web interface?  
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> > > >  
> > > >  
> > > >  
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