EditingFedoraRedhatCom

EditingFedora.Redhat.Com

The canonical page http://fedora.redhat.com is a series of static HTML pages built from PHP pages on an hourly basis. The PHP pages live in CVS. To edit pages, you make changes locally, check in your sandbox instance of fedora.redhat.com, commit the changes to CVS, and tag the changed pages as LIVE. The changes are picked up within an hour.

Here is a method:

1. Check out a copy of the website. These instructions are for anonymous checkout. If you have Fedora CVS access, you can use that account instead. You need CVS access to commit changes. However, this process is also useful for contributors who want to prove the need for access to this special part of CVS.

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.fedora.redhat.com:/cvs/fedora
cvs -z3 login
cvs -z3 co web 

2. There are three HOWTO documents in /cvs/fedora/web/config/:

• HOWTO - explains how to setup the PHP portions for Apache HTTP Server
• HOWTO-DOCS - explains how to convert DocBook output HTML to website PHP
• HOWTO-LIVE - explains how to make files live

CAUTION

The easiest way to setup the PHP instance is on a workstation as localhost. Trying to interleave this with a production system could be disasterous.

3. You can check out from CVS directly into the folder /var/www/fedora.redhat.com/. Your local instance recognizes changes instantly.

4. Look over your pages, especially ones created from DocBook HTML. Make sure each page is pulling in the proper PHP header, footer, and body elements to create the site style.

5. When you have tested and confirmed the quality in your sandbox, use the steps in HOWTO-LIVE to commit your changes and tag them LIVE:

cvs commit -m "Updates to document foo." foo-doc/
...
cvs tag -F LIVE foo-doc/

You must have CVS write access to do commit. Otherwise, you can generate a patch for a bug report:

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.fedora.redhat.com:/cvs/fedora
cvs -z3 login
cvs diff -u foo-doc/foo.xml > /tmp/foo.xml-<yourname>.patch

NOTE

A patch and bug report is an excellent way to contribute to a document. It gives your work a chance to be reviewed and helped, and the rest of the writing/editing teams have a chance to learn about you and your work.