mate-desktop.org

This repository contains the Nikola configuration and content for http://mate-desktop.org.

Contributing content

If you want to add or edit content on http://mate-desktop.org, please submit a pull request.

Contributing a new post

Contributing a new blog post to the mate-desktop.org website is simple.

• Fork this repository.

• Copy blog/20991231markdown-template.md to a new file. For example:

  cp blog/20991231template-markdown.md blog/20131107my-cool-blog-post.md

• Edit your new file, making sure to change the metadata in the file header. The following are valid metadata fields and what they're for.

  • link is optional, but should include the URL to the original article if there is one.
  • description is optional, and should briefly describe the post.
  • tags are any tags that are relevant. You must include the draft tag.
  • date is the intended publication date of the post in the format YYYY/MM/DD HH:MML:SS
  • title is the post title
  • slug is how the post name will be represented in the URL. Make sure you modify the date prefix.
  • author is your full name.

• Commit your changes, submit a pull request and one of the website maintainers will review your submission and publish it if it is suitable.

If you prefer ReStructuredText to Markdown, then follow the same process as above, but use blog/20991231rest-template.rst as the template file.

Embedding images

Markdown and reStructured Test both have markup for embedding images. To embed an image, just drop your correctly sized image into the files/assets/img/blog/ directory and then link to it. When linking to an image assets you drop the 'files prefix from the Markdown and reStructured Text markup.

Markdown image example

![MATE](/assets/mate-128.png)

reStructured Text image example

.. image:: /assets/mate-128.png
    :align: center

Submitting posts for future publication

The date field in the metadata also controls when a post will be published. If you have created a post that should be published at a specific date or time, set the date/time accordingly and that post will not be published until that time.

The mate-desktop.org website is redeployed every 10 minutes, so the actual publication time will be accurate to the nearest 10 minutes.

Preventing a post from being published

If you have a post you are working on but do not wish to publish, just add draft to the list of tags in the metadata. Posts tagged as draft will not be published.

Contributing a translation

To contribute a translated page or blog post to the mate-desktop.org website do the following:

• Fork this repository.

• Copy the blog post or page you wish to translate to a new file with the same filename but ending with the short country code (see below). For example, if you want to translate the home page to German you would do the following:

  cp pages/index.md pages/index.md.de

• Translate the metadata as well as the content. However, do not change the date format.

• Commit your changes, submit a pull request and one of the website maintainers will review your submission.

Nikola supported languages are, the one in bold are already in the site navigation::

• bg Bulgarian
• ca Catalan
• de German
• el Greek
• en English
• eo Esperanto
• es Spanish
• fa Persian
• fr French
• hr Croatian
• it Italian
• jp Japanese
• nl Dutch
• pt_br Portuguese (Brasil)
• pl Polish
• ru Russian
• tr_tr Turkish (Turkey)
• zh_cn Chinese (Simplified)

Markdown vs. ReStructured Text

mate-desktop.org converts Markdown or reStructured Text into HTML. In general we recommend Markdown, but some of the Nikola advanced features are only exposed via reStructured Text extension.

Markdown

Nikola follows the syntax rules of the original markdown.pl with the following extensions enabled:

• extra
• codehilite
• toc

reStructured Text

See the Nikola reStructuredText Primer and the reStructured Text extensions.

The migration

For the benefit of the MATE developers and admins, here is a rundown of how the WordPress site was migrated to Nikola.

Python 2.7

Nikola is being powered by Python 2.7 and some additional packages were required on the server.

sudo apt-get install python2.7-dev libfreetype6-dev libjpeg8-dev libxslt1-dev libxml2-dev libyaml-dev

What are these requirements for?

• python2.7-dev provides the header files for Python 2.7 so that Python modules with C extensions can be built.

The following are required to build pillow, the Python imaging library.

• libjpeg8-dev
• libfreetype6-dev

The following are required to build lxml, a Python XML library.

• libxml2-dev
• libxslt1-dev

The following are required to build python-coveralls.

• libyaml-dev

virtualenv

virtualenv is used to create sandboxed Python environments, so you don't pollute the system Python. This is how the virtualenv for Nikola was created.

cd ~
curl -O https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-1.10.1.tar.gz
tar xvfz virtualenv-1.10.1.tar.gz
cd virtualenv-1.10.1
sudo python setup.py install

Install Nikola 6.4.0

Create an environment for Nikola.

mkdir ~/PythonEnvs
virtualenv -p python2.7 ~/PythonEnvs/nikola-64

Activate the environment.

source ~/PythonEnvs/nikola-64/bin/activate

Download Nikola 6.4.0

mkdir -p ${VIRTUAL_ENV}/src
cd ${VIRTUAL_ENV}/src
wget https://github.com/getnikola/nikola/archive/v6.4.0.tar.gz -O nikola-640.tar.gz
tar zxvf nikola-640.tar.gz
cd nikola-6.4.0

Install the Nikola requirements.

pip install cython
pip install -r requirements-full.txt

Actually install nikola.

python setup.py install

Migrate WordPress to Nikola

Export the WordPress content.

• Tools -> Export -> All Content

Make sure the Nikola environment is activated.

source ~/PythonEnvs/nikola-64/bin/activate

Clone the mate-desktop.org Git repository.

cd ~/Websites
git clone https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-desktop.org

Run the migration.

nikola import_wordpress ~/Downloads/mate.wordpress.2013-10-23.xml ~/Migration

The only interesting log entries form the migration were:

[2013-10-23T15:26:02Z] WARNING: import_wordpress: Not going to import "Wiki" because it seems to contain no content.
[2013-10-23T15:26:02Z] WARNING: import_wordpress: Not going to import "Forum" because it seems to contain no content.

rsync the migrated files to the git repository.

rsync -av ~/Migration/ ~/Websites/mate-desktop.org/

Install html2text.

pip install https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text/archive/master.zip

Convert the WordPress .wp faux HTML files to Markdown and correct the image links.

cd ~/Websites/mate-desktop.org/posts
for FILE in *.wp; do html2text ${FILE} > `basename ${FILE} .wp`.md; done
for FILE in *.md; do sed -i 's/\/martin\/Migration//g' ${FILE}; done
rm *.wp
cd ~/Websites/mate-desktop.org/stories
for FILE in *.wp; do html2text ${FILE} > `basename ${FILE} .wp`.md; done
for FILE in *.md; do sed -i 's/\/martin\/Migration//g' ${FILE}; done
rm *.wp

The metadata and content were merged using scripts/merge_meta.sh.

The clean up

At this point you have a basic Nikola site that preserves all the content (but not the comments) from the WordPress site. Now the hacking begins.

Building and deploying the site

When the site cleanup is complete, Nikola will be integrated with Git so that any new pushes to the mate-desktop.org Git repository will automatically trigger a Nikola build and deploy.

In the meantime, here is how Nikola can be run manually. This assumes you are running as me on the server, however.

source ~/PythonEnvs/nikola-64/bin/activate
cd ~/Websites/mate-desktop.org
nikola build
nikola deploy

TODO

• Add more text to the homepage.
  • Floating MATE logo
  • All the applications, with improved layout.
• Integrate SocialSharePrivacy
  • https://github.com/panzi/SocialSharePrivacy