Simple Site Update
: Illya Nokhrin
Minutes: 660
Quite a few simpleSite builds in the pipeline now. Most of the conference websites are using the styling that PS developed for the Les Francais D’ici conference, with changes to landing page images, colour scheme etc. At some point, we can maybe have him develop a second template so that we can have PIs choose between the two -- maybe something using the work he did on the Brech conference site that never really got content. None of the conference websites have used the multilingual options that I built into simpleSite, but I’m sure there will come a time when those will come in useful.
I completed a refactor of the build so that it now allows for three types of landing page: simple, content, and complex. The type for any specific build is set in the properties.xml file. The simple landing page type essentially retains how simpleSite landing pages were originally envisioned: the landing page is built using the landingPageTemplate file and text supplied from various fields in the properties.xml file. The content type processes the landing page as a content page. It looks for data in a content/index.xml file and applies the full site chrome (eg. top menu and footer) to it. The complex type is similar to the content type insofar as it looks for content in a content/index.xml file, but it does not apply the site chrome to the landing page. The idea behind the complex landing page was that it would give PS full control over the landing page without having to make substantial modifications/place content into the landingPageTemplate.xml file.
Some of the simpleSite builds are really pushing at the limitations of the build process, and I am starting to feel that we may want to refactor/fork the build into two types: conference websites and hub sites. We are now using simpleSite for the Critical Humanities Commons site as well as for the upcoming LOI Discovery Interface sitem, and the features of those (especially the Discovery Interface) are really quite different than those of a conference website, to the point where all the conference stuff (eg. multilingual build options, landing page stuff, etc.) is more likely to get in the way than to be helpful. Still, the build works and JV has an RA coming in to periodically upload content for the Commons site, which seems to be working well. The RA is able to push his changes to the Github repo and I then quickly run the rsyncToLiveServer build target to make them live.