This repository houses the source for UMass Transit's pubic web site hosted at http://umass.edu/transit/ Once it gets to OIT's server, it is an entirely static site, but there are some tools on the developer's end that build it out of some semi-dynamic parts.

Getting Started

The project has a .rvmrc file and a Gemfile in it; run bundle to install the gems you need:

• Stasis
• Redcarpet
• Sass

Now, run stasis to compile the site.

stasis

If you run stasis in "development" mode, it will watch the code directory for changes and re-compile the site whenever a file changes. You also get a HTTP server to test the site out with.

stasis -d 3000

Now, if you visit http://localhost:3000/slideshow.html you'll get a local version of the site.

Stasis

The project page has a great overview of features that stasis has built in -- take a look there first. There are, however, some site-specific things you should know.

The public Directory

Stasis puts the compiled site in the public/ directory. This directory is in the .gitignore file because everything in there is a complied asset, and we don't want the source and the compiled site to diverge.

The controller

The heart of the build process is governed by controller.rb it sets up some instance variables that are used to tell a page what stylesheets and javascripts to include, and can modify the layout of pages. The comments in there are pretty explanitory.

Layout

The main site layout is in layout.html.erb. Every page uses this layout except for the front page (slideshow.html.erb). If you look in the layout file, you will see a tag that says <%= yield %>. Individual page content ends up there.

The layout also contains the following partials:

• _header.html.erb

  contains the search bar, "transit services" wordmark, and the top navigation menus.

• _left_column.html.erb

  contains the left-hand menus. This will be displayed unless you set @leftmenu = false in the before block for the page (useful for extra-wide content).

• _footer.html.erb

  contains the copyright notice and UMass seal.

• _ga.html.erb

  contains the Google Analytics code

File formats

There are all sorts of supported parsers in Stasis, but we've stuck to Markdown for simple pages, Erb for more complicated ones, and SCSS for any pre-processed CSS.

Page titles

The controller will auto populate the page title using the template filename by dropping the extension, replacing underscores with spaces, and capitalizing every word. So blah_blah_blah.html.erb will have a page title of "Blah Blah Blah".

If you want to sepecify a different page title, put it in page_titles.yml

Deployment

Deployment is done with Capistrano with some small modifications to the default process.

The deployment strategy is :copy because our login to OIT's server is pretty crippled. There's no git, no ssh agent forwarding, and no sudo. Luckily, all "copy" needs is sftp access and "tar"/"gzip".

For a similar reason, we need to have a .htaccess file at the root of the deployment location to rewrite requests into the current/public directory. This file is created by Capistrano after you run the deploy:setup task.

The project doesn't actually have a "real" index.html in it. Instead, Capistrano sym-links index to another file on deploy.

• If it is a first-time deploy, index.html gets linked to slideshow.html
• If it is a standard deploy, index.html gets linked to whatever it was already linked to pre-deploy
• A user can switch what index.html is linked to with the cap index:slideshow and cap index:news tasks.