Varena

Varena is a website program for hosting programming problems. It is based on mule, a very lightweight framework.

Installation and contributions

For simplicity, we will not follow the normal development process (fork -> modify -> commit -> submit a pull request). Instead, we will add contributors to the organization so they can work on this repository. If you are familiar with forks and pull requests, you are welcome to do that too.

• If you are new to GNU/Linux, try Ubuntu or Mint -- they are easy to get up and running. Here are the packages you need after a fresh install:

  sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 git mysql-client mysql-server php5 php5-mysql

• We asume an install under /var/www/varena. Give yourself permissions to write there first:

  cd /var/www
  sudo chown yourname.yourname .

• Get a copy of the code:

  git clone https://github.com/varena/varena
  cd varena

• Some light local configuration:

  tools/setup.sh
  sudo chmod 755 uploads (or whatever you set your upload dir to)

• Create the database (adapt to suit your needs; remove -p if root lacks password):

  mysql -u root -e -p 'create database varena charset utf8'

• Edit the file mule.conf to reflect your locale, database config etc.

• That includes specifying the root password, if appropriate (e.g. root:yourpassword@localhost instead of, by default, root@localhost)

• Apply any patches to bring the database schema to date:

  php tools/migration.php

• Depending on your HTTP server and installation path, you may need to enable and configure various modules: userdir, rewrite, PHP. Suggested changes for Ubuntu / Mint:

  • Enable the rewrite module. This is only used to hide .php extensions in URLs

    sudo a2enmod rewrite

  • Make sure the DocumentRoot is /var/www, not /var/www/html or something else. This is usually specified in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf or /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default etc.

  • Modify the relevant config file to allow .htaccess files. For ocument root installations the file is usually /etc/apache2/sites-available/default or 000-default.

    <Directory /var/www/> ... AllowOverride All ....

  • Restart Apache:

    sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

  • Visit http://localhost/varena/www. It should work!

Localization (for users)

To use Varena in your language, you need three things:

• Install the locale you want on your system
• Make sure there is a corresponding entry in the locale/ directory. Note that the names must match exactly. For instance, if your system has a ro_RO locale, but the locale/ directory has a ro_RO.utf8 subdirectory, localization won't work.
• Someone actually needs to do the translation work for your language. You can be that person! :-) See below for contributions.

Localization (for programmers)

We'd like to keep up with localization. You don't need to do the translation yourself, but we'd appreciate it if you tagged the strings that need be localized.

• In PHP, just add a call to gettext() around all literal strings. So instead of

  return 'OpenID login failed';

  please say

  return _('OpenID login failed');

• In Smarty templates, use the "_" variable modifier around string literals. We recommend doing this at paragraph level:

  {"String to be localized"|_}

You can use sprintf in both PHP and Smarty so you can localize parametric sentences:

    {"User %s obtained %d points."|_|sprintf:"John":"100"}

Note that this syntax does not allow for changes in argument orders between languages. We'll try to live with it.

Localization (for translators)

We use poedit for translation. It needs some light customization for the Smarty syntax (poedit doesn't know it by default).

• Install poedit;

• Run

  poedit locale/ro_RO.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po

• Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Personalize and enter your name and email address;

• Under Edit -> Preferences -> Parsers, hit New to add a new Parser. Set these values:

  • language: Smarty
  • extensions = *.tpl
  • parser command = php /var/www/varena/tools/tplParser.php %o %F
  • an item in input files list = %f

To do the actual translation:

• Run Catalog -> Update from sources;
• Translate any new strings.