Don't re-publish existing files and images

With Firedrop2, there's a three-step process to getting your new content onto the web.

1. First, you Build your entries... which means converting them from their easy-to-read text format (with optional mark-up character formatting) into HTML.
   
2. Secondly, (and optionally), you can Preview your site using a web browser to view the generated HTML files still residing on your local PC.
   
3. And thirdly, you Publish the HTML files to your web server.

All is well and good when you only have a few entries in your blog, article collection or item list. The whole process takes under a minute. But what if you have hundreds of entries, as some users do? You could be waiting a while...

What we need is a way to tell if entries have not changed, and thus skip Building or Publishing them. So, I've put together a way to do that. When you open a Firedrop site, a digital signature (or hash) is created. If you change an entry by even one character, the signature will change, and we'll able to tell that the entry needs to be built and published. If the entry's signature hasn't changed, then we can avoid the time and effort to build and publish it, and the whole process can speed up.

One additional detail - we also want to avoid continually re-publishing images and other files, but it's not as quick to make signatures for each of them. On the other hand, they're not as likely to be changed often. So, we can simply check to see if an image file size is the same locally and remotely, and if so, we can avoid publishing it.

This new functionality is now in SVN, and will be included in the next release of Firedrop2 if the testing goes well.

Posted by midtoad on 2006-04-16 01:40:44.
Categories: python, general, firedrop2
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Themes with Firedrop2

Firedrop2 now sports themes! There's a new Themes plugin that allows you to change the look of your website with just one click (plus a few selections)...

In the next release, Firedrop will ship with at least templates so you can try out different looks for your website. We welcome additional contributions.

If you want to design your own, check out the latest code from Subversion and take a look at the 'themes' folder to see how it works. You need to supply a folder containing a CSS stylesheet file and a theme.ini file describing your theme. Additionally, you should have 'files', 'images' and 'templates' folders. The 'files' folder will contain any special files you require (flash?); the 'images' folder will contain any logos you might want, in addition to the stock Firedrop mini-banner, fd2minibanner.png; and the templates folder will contain, well, templates.

Inside your template folder you will need to have three subfolders, one for each type of site that Firedrop supports: articlecollection, itemlist and weblog. And inside each of these folders you'll want to place the templates required by that site type. All three require entry_template.html and page_template.html, while only Weblog does not use indexpage_template.html. In this way, the look of your site can vary from one site-type to another: maybe your weblog will have a three-column format, while your article collection will have a single-column format.

Say you fire up the Themes plugin (by clicking on the Themes button). You'll see the dialog below.

Select one of the available themes, and you'll see a description of it. Of course, a picture is worth more than the description, so just pick one and try it out!

After you select a theme and press ok, you'll see what the plugin proposes to do, as per the image below.

If you're ok with what will happen, say "Oui" (only if your desktop is set up to run in French ), and the necessary files will be copied over to your site directory. If all went well, you'll get a confirmation dialog, as below.

Note: Any pre-existing templates you had in your site directory will not be deleted, and will be saved with the extension '.bak' added to them. Better move them elsewhere if you need them, though, since if you apply the theme again, a new generation of templates will be copied in, and the next-earlier generation will be backed up, over-writing your earlier backup.

Now you can proceed to Build your site, and Preview it. If you like what you see, then go ahead and Publish it, otherwise, try another theme. Before you build, it might be a good idea to use the Publish > Purge menu to clean out all of the old generated html files and ensure the new ones are written to disk.

If you have any questions, try the Firedrop users list on Sourceforge.net. If this page looks like shite with your browser, please let us which browser you are using.

Posted by midtoad on 2006-04-09 18:51:32.
Categories: python, firedrop2
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