Projects/kde.org/Capacity HOWTO

Introduction

Capacity is a versatile framework which helps you to construct your page by focusing on the content. Your pages will be simple PHP-files which include predefined header and footer. This header/footer layout the page, you only provide the real content and menu structure.

Example PHP-file

Any normal page just contains:

 <?php
   $page_title = "Page Title";
   include "header.inc";
 ?>;
 
 Content of the web page
 
 <?php include "footer.inc"; ?>

The magic site.inc

For each subsite, a site.inc in the toplevel directory of this page, which would be equal to the later documentroot on the server in many cases, may be created. This include is used by the header.inc, it should contain some information about your site, like it's name and the email address of the webmaster, this will be used by header/footer to setup the page correct.

An example site.inc would be:

 <?php
   // promote which subdomain we are
   // we are www.kde.org in this case!
   $site = "www";
 
   // use new style ;) yeah
   $templatepath = "newlayout/";
 
   // promote title to use
   $site_title = i18n_var("K Desktop Environment");
 
   // links in the top bar, right
   $menuright = array ('family/'=>'Sitemap',
     'contact/'=>'Contact Us');
 ?>

Even in the site.inc you can already use the i18n-functions, which is important to have the names right on translated pages!

Global Variables setup by header.inc

The header.inc does some setup of global vars, even before it includes the site.inc, these are:

 $site_root
 $document_root
 $url_root
 $current_relativeurl

• $site_root contains the relative path to the toplevel of the current site, like:

 $site_root = "../.."

• $document_root contains the absolut pathname which is the documentroot of this site, even correct if the site isn't in it's own vhost, example:

 $document_root = "/home/www/sites/www"

• $url_root contains the absolute baseurl to the toplevel of your site, if your site would for example have a it's toplevel in http://127.0.0.1:8080/sites/www, like it is for staging, this would contain

 $url_root = /sites/www

• $current_relativeurl contains the relative part of the current url to the url_root, would you access http://127.0.0.1:8080/sites/www/whatiskde/manifest.php and /sites/www is the $url_root, it would contain

 $current_relativeurl = whatiskde/manifest.php

BE AWARE: In former version of the framework it was common to set the $site_root manually before including the header.inc, this won't work now, as the header.inc will overwrite the $site_root. This should cause no danger, as header.inc should find out the right one, but in the long term, all manual definitions should be removed, the global variables header.inc exports should be used to replace the usage of the old $site_root.

The framework is clever, it will never add trailing slashs to the $site_root, $document_root and $url_root, therefor they can and must always be used like:

 $some_url = "$site_root/mycoolpage.php"

Configuration Variables

You can set some variables to alter the behaviour of the framework, either global in your site.inc or in front of your header.inc inclusion in each .php-files.

Useful variables are:

• The Name for your whole subdomain/site, best set once in site.inc

 $site_title = "KDE Foo Site Title";

• The title of the individual page.

 $page_title = "Page Title";

• Don't show edit function on the page. The default is $showedit = true;. This setting should normally not be used. site.inc is the preferred place.

 $showedit = false;

Online Editing

Capacity features online editing and previewing of changes.

You can make and preview changes of existing pages online by clicking on the [edit] link at the bottom of each page. Try it on this page. Then you can download you changes and commit them yourself via SVN, or you can click the link to email a unified diff to the web team.

Menu Definitions

The navigation menu is defined by a number of menu.inc files. They are included by a function in media/includes/classes/class_menu.inc, which is called from media/includes/header.inc. The general menu structure is defined in the menu.inc file of the root directory of each KDE subsite (e.g. http://www.kde.org/menu.inc or http://www.kde.org/areas/kde-ev/menu.inc).

It should look like this:

 <?php
   $this->setName ("KDE Foo Site Title");
   $section =& $this->appendSection("Inform");
   $section->appendLink("Home","");
   $section->appendLink("KDE Home","http://www.kde.org/",false);
   
   $section =& $this->appendSection("A Second Menu Section");
   $section->appendDir("A Subdirectory","subdirectory");
   $section->appendLink("A Single Page","singlepage.php");
 ?>   

Each mentioned subdirectory will then also be searched for a menu.inc file to define a submenu (e.g. http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/menu.inc).

The format is similar:

 <?php
   $this->appendDir("A Subsubdirectory","subsubdirectory");
   $this->appendLink("A Page in the Subdirectory","singlepage.php");
 ?>
 

The content of subsubdirectories is currently not added to the menu, but this may change in future. If a subdirectory has just the index.php file or a submenu for the subdirectory is not desired, then an empty menu.inc can be added. If the menu.inc is missing, then the subdirectory is be treated like having an empty menu.inc file.