coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[Garrett Serack <garretts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've been feverishly trying to write documentation this week ... and at the same time enhancing the DocPad-powered cms engine that's powering the CoApp.org website.

Layout
Over the last couple of days I've tweaked the layout of the website, and I think it's really starting to come together. Thanks to everyone on IRC who gave their feedback!

CMS Engine
The site is a statically-generated website that is based off of DocPad, but over the course of the last few days, I've significantly enhanced it with:

- switched to github-flavored-markdown for the markdown processor

- added the missing triple-backtick (```) syntax-highlighting format for color syntax highlighting  of source code blocks (uses an online pygments webservice)  -- this means no javascript in the browser to do syntax highlighting :)

- enhanced the markdown language with a few new items (turning this slowly into what I call 'garrett-flavored-markdown' ):

- image embedding with overflow wrapper so the image gets a scrollbar:
![alt-text](image-url)

- video embedding, embeds videos with H.264 and webm codecs for HTML5 and a fallback to flash:
%[width,height,posterimageurl,mp4url,webmurl]

- HTML anchor support (for embedding the target of an anchor) :
[text](anchor-id)

- the ability to smuggle links into color-syntax highlighted code:
«somecode«href»
(see the example on the page http://coapp.org/reference/cli.html -- click on the --help in the text)


Stuff to look at!
Please check out the developer articles I've started:

Getting setup with git and github<http://coapp.org/developers/git.html>
Setting up the development environment<http://coapp.org/developers/development-environment.html>
Check out the source code<http://coapp.org/developers/source-code.html>

and the start of the reference work:
Common command-line reference<http://coapp.org/reference/cli.html>
ptk.exe<http://coapp.org/reference/ptk.html> -- CoApp 'porting toolkit'


As you can see, I've started to make some 'standards' around what the content looks like, hopefully this will help people start to get a grip on the work that we've been doing.


I'd love your feedback, and even more, I'd love any help you can provide.

Playing with the CMS:

The only tools you need to play with the CMS engine is a git and a text editor. (Not notepad!)

You can clone the repository:
git clone git@xxxxxxxxxx:coapp/new_coapp.org.git

You can run the embedded mini-server by running the command:
cd new_coapp.org
server.cmd
     - don't worry about any error message right now
     - you might get a firewall popup. Say yah, it's ok
     - press ctrl-c to stop the server (when you're done, or it does something goofy)

>From there, you should be able to see the website in a browser:
http://localhost:9778

Modify files in the ./src/ directory and below, and the server will automatically regenerate the site (and beep when it's done)... Lather, rinse, repeat.

If you've been putting off getting involved, now is a good time! Come check out the content (yeah, there's lots of 404s yet!)  Feel free to fix them, put in placeholder pages, fix stuff, and send me a pull request on github!

Turn lousy docs into good ones!

If you have any questions, ping me! Come to the IRC channel, just ... do SOMETHING!!

Garrett