The website was updated in Jan 2013 to better reflect the project and the things capable of the project.

When the website was built, it was built to have a "responsive" design, so that it looked ok on both mobile, tablets and desktops. It uses Twitter Bootstrap (2.3) as a base, and the 960 grid design system. This should allow everybody to pretty much do what they need to do on the client-side without a whole lot of fuss.

It is currently running on the Apache CMS, which is loosely built on a combination of an mdtext compiler and Svnpubsub. You can find out more about the history and setup of the Apache CMS at The Apache CMS page on INFRA

Given the limitations, we are not able to have any middleware or application servers power our server. We are limited to straight pre-compiled HTML.

The source-code (and what the "staging" server is based on) is located in our SVN. Check the /flex/site/trunk to see the entire source code.

The MDTEXT engine runs on "buildbot", and we are unable to modify its source code. We can, however extend it slightly. Take a look at the /flex/trunk/trunk/view/*.pm files.

  • path.pm dictates which files will be processed by mdtext. If the file extension is not listed here, it won't touch it. This is important for two reasons : If the file is not processed, it won't get a header, footer, or any other auto-includes. It also won't get processed for formatting... for example, if you indent the your files to make them readable, mdtext takes that as needing to add "<pre>" tags around everything. Files that are not picked up by path.pm are placed as-is to the staging server.
  • view.pm is how the files that pass the path.pm filters get processed.

The "v2" website is broken into a set of templates. These templates are wrapped around each of the content pages (located in /flex/site/trunk/content). If you want to use the v2 site, the page MUST live in the /flex/site/trunk/content/ directory, and it must have a file extension of .cmsPage (caps matter). Keep in mind that pages with extension of .cmsPage are renamed to be .html when they are published to both staging and production. If you update any of these files in SVN, buildbot will rebuild the entire site. It may take 15 minutes for your changes to go live. Please, be patient (smile)

  • flex-v2-header.html This includes the header provided to all the v2 pages. This includes the menu. You will need to touch this if you want to add any new pages to the navigation.
  • flex-v2-footer.html This includes the bottom footer and copyright statement. This includes the version numbers of our packages.
  • flex-v2-hometemplate-top.mdtext This is the upper half of the homepage. It includes everything above the "learn flex" section.
  • flex-v2-hometemplate-bottom.mdtext This is the bottom half of the homepage, below the Latest News section. The rest of the homepage is within /flex/site/trunk/content/index.cmsPage
  • flex-v2-renderer.html This is the glue for the above templates.
  • All other templates are generally not used anymore. Buildbot still looks for them (for some odd reason), so please don't remove them.

When editing the .cmsPage files within /flex/site/trunk/content/, note that your content will live between <div id="wrapper" class="container-fluid"> <div class="row-fluid"> tags. Embrace these.

We currently look for two "Tags". These must be the first line of your .cmsPage.

  • Title: Title adds the title to the <head> of the page, and will add it to the large header space above your content, but below the menu.
  • HomePage: Adds the homepage template content. Don't use this unless you are working on the homepage.
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