JMRI: Web Site

This page discusses technical aspects of the JMRI web site.

If you just want to know how to make a small change to a web or help page, please see the separate page of instructions.

Structure of Information

We distinguish between three types of information on the main web site:

User information which is useful at run time. This is made available both via our JavaHelp, and also directly by placing those files on the web.
User information which is either not useful at run time, such as instructions for installing the software, or is too large for inclusion in releases, e.g. video clinics.
Reference information from releases, such as decoder definitions, copies of scripts, JavaDocs, etc.

We provide these separately:

Run-time user information is made available by putting the help system on the web site.
Other user information is stored in Subversion as the trunk/jmri-website directory and placed directly on the web site.
Reference information is put on the web site from their own Subversion modules, or created by automated Ant scripts during release builds.

Technology

Page formatting is done using CSS, originally set up by John Plocher. All pages should reference the CSS files for screen and printing from the "/css" directory. This also means that you should leave the formatting to the style sheets, and minimize the explicit formatting that you do in HTML directly.

Because we use our web pages in JavaHelp, there are some restrictions on use of tags. See our JavaHelp web page for more on this.

We are moving toward using server-side includes to provide consistent headers, sidebars and footers. This will also allow us to share HTML content between the web and the JavaHelp system used by the program itself. Each page will contain just content, plus includes for files named "Header", "Sidebar" and "Footer" which contain the navigation information. Eventually, all but a few index pages will have ".shtml" extensions. (The remaining index.html pages keep that name so that people who request just a directory URL will be served something useful)

Directory Organization

The web site contains several separate areas, which translate to different SVN directories:

jython, resources, xml, web - these are taken directly from the directories of the same name under trunk/jmri/. They are only occasionally referenced directly.
help - from the Subversion module and JavaHelp system, this has the internal structure described below and on our JavaHelp page.

The rest are from the trunk/jmri-website, and are checked out at the root of the web server.

releasenotes - Specific information on each test and production release
install - Information on how to install the JMRI software on various kinds of computers
community - Clinics, web pages, and other community-contributed information
images - (Images used by web pages)
contact -

The following directories still contain content in site.new, but are in the process of being moved into the JavaHelp pages for use both on the web and in the program:

apps -
doc -
hardware -
tools -

As part of the migration, a number of directories remain that contain only redirects and/or obsolete files:

Local Web Site: MacOS X

If you want to host a copy of the JMRI web site on your local MacOS X machine, follow these instructions to first configure the Apache server to do server-side includes, and then make a copy of the web site files available to the server.

You need to edit the Apache web server's configuration file.
- On MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger), this is the /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file
- On MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) and later, this is the /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file
Once you've located the file, open it with your favorite editor (You'll need to authenticate with the administrator password to modify this file).
- To turn on server-side includes, find the section that looks like
```
# This may also be "None", "All", or any combination of "Indexes",
# "Includes", "FollowSymLinks", "ExecCGI", or "MultiViews".
#
# Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All"
# doesn't give it to you.
#
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
```
  Add the word "Includes" to the last line so it looks like
```
    Options Includes Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
```
- Now, configure the server to handle files with ".shtml" extensions. Find the section that looks like:
```
    #
    # To use server-parsed HTML files
    #
    #AddType text/html .shtml
    #AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
```
  and un-comment the last two lines so that it looks like
```
    #
    # To use server-parsed HTML files
    #
    AddType text/html .shtml
    AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
```

To check out a copy of the files:

Change to the web server directory
```
cd /Library/WebServer/Documents
```

Check out the relevant files

# the trailing dot on the next line is important!
svn co https://jmri.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jmri/trunk/jmri-website .  
svn co https://jmri.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jmri/trunk/jmri/help 
svn co https://jmri.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jmri/trunk/jmri/jython
svn co https://jmri.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jmri/trunk/jmri/resources
svn co https://jmri.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jmri/trunk/jmri/web
svn co https://jmri.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jmri/trunk/jmri/xml

Restart your computer to reinitialize the web server.
Test it by trying to display the URL http://localhost/, which should get you a JMRI index page.