# Varia website

> https://varia.zone/

## Pelican

The Varia website is made with Pelican, a static site generator written in
Python. This means that the website is first generated on a computer (using
Python, Jinja and Pelican) into a set of html pages, files and images. This set
of documents is then uploaded to the server.

One of the things that Pelican uses is *plugins*. They are used to add extra
features to the generation process of the website.

In this repository there is a folder called 'plugins' and another one called
'plugins-custom'.

The first one, 'plugins', is linked to the offical collection of plugins from
the Pelican project '[pelican-plugins](https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-plugins/)'.

The other one, 'plugins-custom', consists of plugins that we wrote ourself.

## Clone

To clone both the varia.website and pelican-plugins repository, add the --recurse-submodules option in your git clone command:

`$ git clone https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/varia/varia.website.git --recurse-submodules`

If you forgot to clone with the submodile argument, you can still do it with the following command:

`$ git submodule update --init --recursive`

## Install

$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

## Start

You can make use of the makefile, for example by running the following command to start a python server:

`$ make devserver`

Visit the website at localhost:8000

To see what is in the makefile, try:

`$ make help`

## Update submodules

We are currently using two submodules:

* pelican-plugins ([https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-plugins](https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-plugins))
* plugins-custom ([https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/varia/plugins-custom](https://git.vvvvvvaria.org/varia/plugins-custom))

To update these submodules within your (already) cloned repository, first init the submodule, and then update it:

`cd /path/to/submodule`

`git submodule init`

`git submodule update`

## Posting Content

We're using Pelican to generate a static website. The main way to add content
to the website is by making 'posts' in the folder `content`. This can be done
either locally or via the gitlab interface by creating a new file. Make sure
that each article contains at least the following at the top of the document:

    Title: een nieuw initiatief
    Date: 2017-07-07 18:32
    Category: news
    Tags: event, workshop
    slug: the-name-of-the-html-page
    lang: nl OR en

Articles are written in a markup language called markdown.

[Here](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) is an overview of the syntax.

You can also use the online editor in gitlab to help you.