This post was originally written as an email to the mailing list of the FSFE web team. In the text I describe my progress in tidying up our xsl rules and integrating campaign sites.
Hello List,
it's been a while. Upcoming tasks aside, my project focus is still the web site.
1. Modified XSLT code
The biggest obstacle for us to deploy sub pages with styles different from the main page was that the way of including xsl rules seemed very unclear. I had a really hard time analysing the code and making sense of it.
As XHTML goes, the two highest level sections in a document are <head> and <body>, to describe both sections we use extensive style rules. I was pretty confused by the fact, that both rule sets are applied in completely different ways. I don't think there was a reason for that, the original code must just have been written by different people or copied from different tutorials.
Anyway, I normalised the method and the template names for the sections. To completely override a page style it is now enough to define a template named "page-head" and one named "page-body" and execute (include) the file build/xslt/fsfe_document.xsl.
Fun fact: the most useful documentation for me when working with XSLT code was the one in the Microsoft developers network.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms256069(v=vs.110).aspx
2. Started to move pdfreaders
Finally being able to properly override page styles I started to move pdfreaders.org to our current build system. I am already playing around with code to have the readers defined in separate files. I use code from the news page to compile a page from tags in different files. News files, being listed in a row, ordered by the news date became reader definition files listed by priority.
See http://test.fsfe.org/pdfreaders
X. What's coming up
Moving drm.info and theydontwantyou.to over to the build system should now be rather simple too. The static build systems of those pages are outdated and don't run on our machines anymore, to update translations, we will need to either update the build systems, provided they are still maintained or better yet, do the transfer.
For the time ahead I will not do too much on the xsl files. I am going to focus on the perl and shell scripts, which can make a real difference regarding build speed and features.