Webmastering
The Web team maintain and develop the FSFE's websites — ranging from fsfe.org to project and campaign sites. Webmasters are volunteers working to enhance the organization's face to the world, and to improve the technical solutions of our web efforts.
Get to know us, get to know the website
If you want to get an idea of what work on FSFE's website consists of, the best way is to come have a chat with us. Some of the webmasters are regularly on Libera Chat's #fsfe channel, where we will be happy to meet you and answer your questions! To check out who is working on the website, and with FSFE as a whole, visit the FSFE's team page and the specific Web team page.
Introduction
The technologies and programs used to maintain the FSFE web page should already be familiar to many developers and authors and might be of interest to those that have not yet discovered them.
Translators and occasional volunteers will most likely only get in touch with
Volunteers interested in getting deeper into the maintenance should also be familiar with
Understanding how the web pages are built
The web pages of fsfe.org are maintaned as a set of XML files. The web server generates the HTML pages from these XML files automatically every ten minutes. Consequently, all editing of the pages is done in the XML files, and the HTML is never edited directly.
Every page on fsfe.org is named pagename.language.html (language being the two-letter ISO-639 code of the language, like "en" for English or "de" for German). The source files are named pagename.language.xhtml.
Some pages have a dynamic part: apart from the fixed texts taken from the XHTML file, they include information from one or several XML files. Whenever such a page is built, the build system takes the translated XML files where available, and falls back to the English version of those XML files that have not yet been translated. This way, such pages can end up with parts of the text being translated and other parts still showing in English. Examples of such pages include the start page, the news page, and the events page.
Working with the website as an editor
Please visit our website editing wiki page to find more information about:
- how to copy the websites' source code to your computer
- how to edit and push files to the website
- how to coordinate with other website editors
- responsible handling of write access
- advanced webmaster techniques
- proper licencing of source code and media