On 19 April 2018 at 13:27, sebb <seb...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have done some further investigation of using JSON and Jekyll. > > I think JSON is not the best format for maintenance. > This is because it is messy including chunks of text (e.g. for > additional info on the project). > Also it does not allow any comments. > The format is rather strict, with lots of quotes needed, and brackets > and braces. > > I think we should use YAML for the raw data, and (if necessary) > extract a subset into a JSON file for external consumption. > > As to Jekyll: > > Jekyll can equally use a YAML data file, so it is not a problem > changing to YAML. > > At present the attic-test PoC includes a single JSON data file which > is processed in a plugin script that generates the individual page > data. > > This works well (and it looks like BuildBot supports the use of Jekyll > plugin scripts - other sites such as GitHub may not) > > But I think it would be better to have a separate YAML file per project. > > Jekyll can process these as part of a collection. > This avoids the need to use a plugin to generate the pages. > I think it also makes it a bit more obvious what is going on (each > output file has an input file) > > And the YAML body can contain arbitrary markup to be added to the > generated page. > This would make it easier to preserve the extra information present in > some of the existing xml files > > A question: > On a tablet, would it be harder to maintain one file per project > rather than a single large file? > > i.e. instead of updating projects.json one would need to create/update > a projects/project.md file.
I have updated the attic-test tree with a YAML-based version: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/attic/site-test/yaml The yaml.sh script in the parent directory will create the output in docs3/. This should currently be identical to the output in docs2/ - apart from the date in feed.xml If this looks like it will be suitable for use when working from tablets, I can tidy it up and start migrating some of the additional text from the xdocs/projects files If not, please advise what needs to be done to make it possible to update the site from a tablet.
