foldingcommunity / pagerenderer

Component to render pages from templates and translation files.

Folding @ home Page Renderer

This application takes the translations from FoldingCommunity/Translate and injects them into templates to render out HTML pages for all the languages we are supporting.

It is part of a larger system (currently in construction), which will semi-automate the updating of the Folding @ home website.

Usage

1. Make sure you initialized and updated the submodules

   $ git submodules init
   $ git submodules update
   

   This will make sure that you have the latest version of all the translations and templates.

2. Just run the rendering script and it will dump the rendered pages into output/:

   $ python3 render.py
   

Next Steps

This application is currently in a very early stage. There are lots of things to improve:

Check out the open issues to find out more.

pagerenderer's Issues

Page rendering fails if translation file contains certain empty header tags

Looks like some PO file editors insert additional header tags that raise the expectation that a date value is included there. The Babel library used to parse the PO files sees these missing values as error and throws an exception.

I didn't look into it very closely yet, but it can easily be seen if you run the render.py right now. It prints:

Rendering templates\together-we-are-powerful.php
	...
	⚠ Failed to generate for es-MX: time data '' does not match format '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M'

A quick look at the relevant PO file shows that there are header entries called POT-Creation-Date and PO-Revision-Date, which are not present in the other translation files.

Use a proper templating engine/library

At the moment the placeholders in the template are {{{ mustache }}} style, but I created a very simple and stupid helper function to take care of replacing them with the actual values.

I started out using chevron.render() to do this, but unfortunately Mustache considers dots (.) in keys to be an indicator for a nested scope. As we have full paragraphs in our keys, this doesn't work. Another issue was that chevron does not support defining a fallback if a key is missing and just replaces it with an empty string, which I believe we do not want.

Add tests

There is absolutely no test coverage right now. We should have at least some basic unit tests and maybe a few component tests to make sure this thing won't randomly break once we start rely on it.

Use a proper Markdown renderer

At the moment a very simple fake rendering function is taking care of replacing the inline markdown with proper HTML.

I originally tried to use markdown,markdown() to do this, but couldn't find an easy way of preventing the insertion of HTML tags as wrapper around the entire string.

Create proper templates for all pages (in a separate repository?)

To get started I just created two very basic templates that have nothing to do with how the corresponding pages actually look like.

We need to create proper templates for all the pages.

I would also recommend to place those templates in a separate repository and not to have them in here. They could be imported here via a git submodule.

Integrate renderer with the Wordpress interface component

Once it has been built, this rendering component needs to be integrated with the interface component that will push the rendered pages to Wordpress.