The CSE 403 Project Website

How To Edit The CSE 403 Project Website

The CSE 403 Project website is stored in our CVS General Purpose Repository in the Website module. To edit the site, simply checkout the Website module, make your changes, test your changes, and then commit your changes.

After you commit your changes, the Fireman automatic build system will "build" the website and update the live files. The current build status is available on the fireman status page. The "build" currently consists solely of copying the files from the CVS repository to the live site, but in the future will also include tests such as checking for dead links, verifying the HTML, etc.

The website HTML files are written in Location-Independent-HTML and will work locally as well as on the live site (except for the server-side include information, which includes the set of links down the left-hand sides of pages). Thus you should always use your browser on your workstation to verify changes before committing them.

Checklist For Editing Website

1. If you have added or removed any top-level files or directories, you must also edit the install.pl script. This self-documented Perl program is used to install into the live site. If you don't update it, your new files/directories will not appear on the live site.
2. Cvs update and fix all conflicts
3. Cvs update to confirm that there are no unknown (?) files
4. Use your local browser to verify that all the changes are correct
   • Spelling
   • Images appear and are placed correctly
   • Links work
   • Internal pages have the standard Id footer
5. Commit your changes with a descriptive log message

Where Are The Live Files?

David says: I suggest you modify the build to do something like this for CSE 403.

The UrbanSim live files (although you shouldn't need to know this) are on the CSE machines at /projects/urbansim/www. The "build" does a wholesale replace of most of these files and directories, so you are urged not to make changes in the live files because they will just be overwritten the next time the Website build gets run.

Because the web server is maintained by the CSE staff, it is their web server and thus they make the rules. One of those general rules is that we cannot run CGI scripts. So far we have not needed to.